GLITCH
“An unflinching depiction of a son trying to solve the mystery of a parent’s life, as well as coming to terms with his own contradictions. It is a wise and tender novel.”
VULGAR THINGS
“The poetry of estuary landscapes – muddy creeks, silhouettes of refineries, the slow passage of giant container ships, the flat horizon – shines through Lee Rourke’s prose with a black luminescence.”
— Tom McCarthy
THE CANAL
“Is it possible to find meaning in boredom? Lee Rourke believes that there is meaning in this most maligned of moods. Finding it just takes time—a boring enterprise to be sure, but as Rourke’s antihero discovers, a liberating one.”
—The Wall Street Journal
VANTABLACK
“Reading Vantablack I felt I’d found something I needed to read for a very long time. Something at the threshold of experience, beyond it, transcending it. To conceive of being disembodied, one has to first have a body; then one has to be able to conceptualise something beyond our singular subjectivity, which is impossible unless you are a poet, a philosopher, or a physicist. Something I always understood, and this book makes clear – black is not merely a colour, a concept or a substance but a terrifying lure. To be carried away so far by a piece of literature is an extraordinary achievement fully realised by the poet, and in turn, this reader. I experienced a recognition rarely felt – something indescribable – to find a word for that sensation is impossible – read this book.”
—Melissa Lee-Houghton
VARROA DESTRUCTOR
“We often consume writing to help us escape from our mundanity, but Rourke shows us that our mundane lives are definitely worth exploring through art. Varroa Destructor makes the reader think about the minutiae in life, it forces the reader to step away from the habits and repetitions in their world and appreciate them, whether they are good or bad.”
— Kit Caless
A Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction
“Aesop, the Greek "anti-philosopher" who was flung off a cliff by humour-challenged Delphians, is a kind of literary Socrates: all subsequent literature can be read as Aesopian footnotes or variations. So argues Rourke energetically, as he whisks us past the fabulists Phaedrus, Odo of Cheriton, Marie de France, Romi (the deeply amusing Sufist) and Fontaine, then through Kafka, Joyce and Borges, and up to cultish modern "microfiction" and "flash fiction”
— The Guardian
Trying To Fit A Number To A Name: The Essex Estuary
Novelist Lee Rourke and journalist Tim Burrows explore the myths and identity of modern Essex in two complementary essays about estuary Essex think, Southend-on-Sea, Canvey Island, the Dengie Peninsula. Both Tim and Lee explore themes through Dr Feelgood, TOWIE, Conrad, Heidegger, the mud and flatness of the estuary and much more...
Everyday
A series of stories charting London's psychogeographical hinterlands, Everyday marks an exciting debut. Glibly humourous and with a big, blackened heart beating throughout, Rourke - a leading light of 'The Off-Beat Generation' writers currently making the leap from web to print - delivers a stunning collection charting the tormented lives of everyday misanthropes - and the grubby blank-eyed pigeons that dwell in the gutter alongside them.
— Shortlist Magazine