New Oldestland by Guy Benjamin Brookshire

Historical scholarship on the doomed colonies of The Latitudinarian Empire receives its only treatment in Guy Benjamin Brookshire’s “New Oldestland.”

“The falling unto flying of a people without name . . . A revision of things never vised.”

 

— Hiram Kelly

Using only an exacto-knife and history books, Brookshire’s classic work splashes the Enlightenment’s adventures with preposterous whimsy and molests time to reveal History as Absurd Horror.

Rendered here for the first time in a revised abridged edition from Amy McDaniel’s 421 Atlanta (2014), the student observes 16 full-color facsimile reproductions and their captions from the original unpublished manuscripts.

With his mastery of the forgotten art of history, Guy Benjamin Brookshire commands his reader to wake up. Not since Tocqueville wrote his famous reports has a political clairvoyant made the matters of a distant and foreign land feel so immediate and pressing as Brookshire does in New Oldestland.

–John Dermot Woods, author of Activities (Publishing Genius)

 

A more accurate history than most. Makes learning feel like forgetting. Does to maps what wind does to water. Does to names what our names did to us.

–Mark Leidner, author of Beauty Was the Case that They Gave Me (Factory Hollow)

 

Guy Benjamin Brookshire was born in Searcy, Arkansas, in 1977, got covered in fire ants in 1980, and traveled widely. He studied poetry at The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, where he met and later married librarian Amanda Choi. They have two girls, Beatrix and Blythe, and live in Northern California. He is the author of The Universe War, a collage comic book. Hello My Meat,a collaboration with Daniel Beauregard, is forthcoming from Lame House Press.