Battle Without Honor or Humanity

Battle Without Honor irreal short story collection cover art
by D. Harlan Wilson
  • $12.95 Paperback
    ISBN: 978-1-935738-76-3

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Taking its cue from the theme song of Kill Bill by Tomoyasu Hotei, Battle without Honor or Humanity is a thought experiment in the short story form. The deranged politicians, simian film directors, choleric tyrants, fevered academics and berserk everymen that populate this first volume scurry like vermin through dreamlike environments that have been imploded by the hammer of media and information technologies.

Based in part on the author’s lifelong practice of the martial arts, especially judo and Jeet Kune Do, unlikely English professor D. Harlan Wilson weaves a tapestry of narrative violence and wages an attack against conventional fiction while calling for a higher understanding of what it means to write, to read, and to make meaning. Challenging, absurdist and stylish, this book is a mad Rottweiler that goes for the jugular at every turn.

What They’re Saying About Battle Without Honor or Humanity

“In this volume of testosterone-fueled and intentionally disorienting short fiction, Wilson invokes not a dialogue with the reader but a bare-knuckle fistfight…Some books that feel like drugs are smooth and shocking. This one is made of the bad drugs, and it delivers a rough, crunchy high. There is no resolution, only the lingering threat that Wilson intends to do all this again.”
—Publishers Weekly

“D. Harlan Wilson moves so fast he strips his labels.”
—Steve Aylett, author of LINT, Slaughtermatic and Novahead

“D. Harlan Wilson is a top chef in the fast-paced test kitchen of language. In Battle without Honor or Humanity, his cutting board-u-copia includes, to name but a few ingredients, the cinematic eye, naked lunch scraps, New York School echoes (poetry and/or painting, take your pick), the sweet science soured, literary theory gone off the rails, and, yes, the Kennedys. The joy is in the cooking.”
—Peter Cherches, author of Lift Your Right Arm

“Each story in this wonderful collection goes right for the vitals as Wilson uses his savage pen and his serrated wit to carve up the soft white underbellies of language and life. His prose froths off the tongue, words all convulsing as they struggle for final breath. If you want to remember why good writing pulses and writhes on the page, D. Harlan Wilson is your man. Damn, this is good stuff!”
—Eckhard Gerdes, author of How to Read and editor of Journal of Experimental Fiction