Burn Your Belongings slowly, relentlessly builds the emotional ebb and flow of a love triangle over a period of months, perhaps years. Every fear, joy, doubt, hatred, desire and elation manifests through a litany of interior monologues – from the mundane to the profound and always beautifully lyrical. The accretion of imagery and often frighteningly stark examination of Self and Other create a transformational emotional experience. Hoenigman’s brilliance is his ability to transfer language to the reader so that by novel’s end, the feelings and observations of the characters become not their memories but the reader’s own.
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Burn Your Belongings
“Destined for cult status.”
– Alex Martin, Outsider Writers Collective
“David Hoenigman's Burn Your Belongings is a dense narrative of choppy sentences that elude the human desire for story at almost every turn. When read aloud, mantralike, the thick walls of text take on the feel of religious chant, a prayer to weariness and sickness and anxiety. At other times, they flutter with moments of happiness and love, and feel exponentially more like real life than anything Hemingway or any naturalist ever put to paper. In the margins of each page is a different vibrant color collage by Yasutoshi Yoshida. The collages add another layer, another conversation, to the book.”
– Paul Constant, book critic for The Stranger
