Richard’s new novel MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER is out now on White Rabbit
‘I am an ugly man, a meese meshigena-omi, but a fashionable omi. And soon to be a molto famous omi. Lell my lapper.’
Set at the fag-end of the 1960s and framed as a novel within a novel published by a seedy London purveyor of pulp fiction, MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER is a homage to the avant-garde counterculture of the twentieth century. Told in Polari, it is the story of an anarchist named Raymond Novak and his plan to commit a ‘fantabulosa crime’ in 276 days that will revolt the world. A surrealistic odyssey that stretches from occupied Paris to the cruise-liner SS Unmentionable to lawless Tangier before settling in Swinging London, the book casts Novak as an agitator and freedom fighter – but, as his memoirs become more and more threatening, his publishers find themselves far more involved in his violent personality cult than they ever intended.
Constructed like a hallucinogenic cocktail of A Clockwork Orange, Pale Fire and Jean Genet’s jailbird fantasies, MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER is an act of seductive sedition by a writer with unfathomable literary talent and boldness. Wild, transgressive, erotic, and resolutely uncompromising, this marks the return of a writer who is out there on an island of his own making; a book that will be talked about, celebrated and puzzled over for decades.
‘Ingenious’ - The Guardian Books Highlights for 2023
‘Outrageous, audacious and shameless, Man-Eating Typewriter is a brilliantly constructed murderous lark. Like A Clockwork Orange adapted by John Waters at his most gleeful’ - John Higgs, author of William Blake vs the World and Love and Let Die
‘A daring, meandering, brilliant book… An exhibition of literary verve as well as a probing examination of morality within a sick society, Man-Eating Typewriter is a phenomenal achievement’ - Nicholas Harris, Literary Review
‘Filthy, deranged - and fantabulosa… Belly laughs abound… The sentences snap and sparkle… [It] deserves to be boosted by a prize or two’ - Jake Kerridge, The Telegraph
‘Richard Milward… writes like a demon, and has produced that rarest of all things on the modern bookshelf: a genuinely exhilarating entertainment. The linguistic invention borders on the dazzling… both laugh-out-loud funny and authentically disgusting’ - Neil Bartlett, The Guardian
Buy the MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER trade paperback direct from White Rabbit HERE
Buy the MAN-EATING TYPEWRITER audiobook (narrated by Richard Milward and Marc Graham) from Audible HERE
