Daybook's BIRTHDAY
My strange little novel turns one
Looking back over this blog earlier this week I was shocked (but not to surprised, if that makes any sense) to see I published nothing here for the entirety of 2024. Which is probably something a more self-promotionally savvy person would have avoided doing in the year that their first novel came out. I am not self-promotionally savvy person, I guess. As evidenced by the fact that my last post was made in November 2023. Announcing my book Daybook as forthcoming.
In any case, Daybook did come out, on 24 April 2024. We had a great party for its release: my newish friend Austin Adams read, and two of my oldest friends provided musical entertainment and emcee’d, respectively. We followed the reading by eating a midnight brisket. It was pretty much the perfect day. (I wanted to post pictures from the reading but my phone isn’t cooperating with me!)
A few weeks later I went to NYC and read at Unnameable Books with my press-mate Greg Gerke. It was a great trip, mostly for the excellent people I got to meet for the first time (and an old friend who popped up at the reading: Hi, Susannah!). A major highlight was getting drinks with novelist (and excellent conversationalist) Emily Hall. I also had a lovely time talking with her husband, writer Phil Campbell.
In December I went and did a reading at Alina Stefanescu’s place in Birmingham, Alabama. We conducted an interview which eventually will see the light of day somewhere! As you can see, we enjoyed ourselves:
While Daybook did not receive an “official” review until earlier this year, a number of sharp cookies said nice things about it, and it was long-listed for the 2025 Republic of Consciousness Prize, whose judges described the novel as “A Strange, sombre novel in which a troubled young writer unpacks the legacy of his religious upbringing. Told in the form of a memoir by a narrator prone to Bernhardian digressions, it devolves into a quietly absorbing meditation on literature, mortality and sexual shame.”
A few of Daybook’s accolades follow:
“Daybook is a brilliant, swirling evocation of time and memory and, perhaps most of all, what it means to transform thought into writing. Nathan Knapp has written a funny, inventive and haunting book.” —Jess Walter, author of The Cold Millions, Beautiful Ruins and The Zero.
“Flaubert famously wanted to one day write a book about nothing, and although Nathan Knapp’s Daybook isn’t that exactly, it is, I think, precisely the kind of book that Flaubert would nevertheless have admired: oddly propulsive by virtue of its prose, devoid of received and insincere ideas, resistant to facile reduction, new. A book like this one—a book that asks its reader to reflect critically on how they’ve spent their limited time alive while also reassuring its reader their time has been well spent in reading it—is extremely rare.” —Gabriel Blackwell, author of Civilization, Comment Section and Doom Town
“Can a book be haunted and exuberant at the same time? Can it be funny and the saddest thing you’ve ever read? Can it feel like it was improvised live on stage while its sentences were chiseled in stone? I don’t know how Nathan Knapp pulled this off, but the result is exactly what I’m always looking for: An absolutely one-of-a-kind book that held me rapt from the first word to the last.” —Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying
“Daybook is called a daybook and is a book punctuated, more or less, by days—days that are are turned back on themselves, revisited, reinterrogated, and inverted until time becomes both a willful vector and the still point around which all revolves. Many questions are asked, some are never answered, some are answered so many times that they revert to questions. The very spaces between thes entences are heavy with unspoken movement. You don’t know where you are and you know exactly, which is only and precisely what a great novel does.” —Emily Hall, author of The Longcut
Okay. That’s all the blurbs.
Over on Twitter, critic Emmett Stinson listed Daybook as one of four “weird/difficult/strange novel(s) from the past five years” which he thought should’ve gotten more attention, and elsewhere described it as “a beautiful, melancholy and (or so it seems to me) Murnanian short novel.”
In his review for Maudlin House, writer and painter Dmitry Samarov described Daybook as “one of the best pieces of contemporary writing I’ve read in the last few years.”
Dmitry was also kind enough to draw the portrait of me below, and we talked on his podcast called hu u no (I enjoyed this so much that halfway through it just felt like talking, and in my head I was trying to invent reasons to drive through Chicago so I can hang out with him). He even read from the novel here.
I also appeared on Ben Lindnor’s Beyond the Zero podcast. Twice. Both times were a pleasure.
And did this interview with my editor, Daniel Davis Wood, at 3am Magazine.
And this one, with my friend Jason Christian, for Full Stop.
Okay. That’s the roundup. If you made it this far and want to purchase the book, you can snag it here, here, or here.
I was very impressed by DAYBOOK.