A book as powerful, monumental and strangeas Alasdair Gray’s Lanark in miniature.
        —Joanna Walsh

A showcase, ransacked with horrid delight. Fowler’s MUEUM presents the placid, lurid violencesof surveillance and exhibition with startling and brutal stylishness. 
       A seething triumph.
       —Eley Williams 





Deeply, beautifully unsettling, and somehow so complete that I have screwed up and rewritten this endorsement seventeen times. As a text, MUEUM seems to eat any potential response to it. Sometimes I called it a mesmerising, bravura meditation on work, power, and subjugation; sometimes I called it the psychopathology of the institution; sometimes I just made sub-animal noises. Initially I just felt awe at how compelling Fowler can make the sheer tedium of labour, in an environment terrifyingly regimented, curious (and intimate, like being let backstage behind existence itself), but this was gradually replaced by an increasing suspense and horror which got its claws into me for the whole last half of the novella. 
        Anyway. It makes me very happy—and also insanely jealous—that works like this are being written.
        —Luke Kennard





Down in the mire of London's grimpen, above the drained marshlands and drift of the fatbergs, exist the cultural centres that shine like jewels in the mudcake of the greatest city on earth: London's museums. 
        Their great domes are craniums through which pass the crazy, unbidden thoughts of a culture always moving closer to madness. With the apocalyptic vision of Ballard and the acerbic attitude of Céline, MUEUM scatters human detritus over the shiny Perspex of our most dearly loved vitrines. Rimbaud's visits to the British Museum reading room come to mind: scratching himself down for lice as he flicked through the latest encyclopaedias. And Bataille, assembling curios so strange the Surrealists wouldn't touch them wearing gloves.
        MUEUM is a novel of watchers and the watched, a testament to the fact that people are more interesting—and far stranger—than things. And nothing is stranger than people’s obsession with touching objects from the questionable past. 
        Prepare to travel the world, from Rome to Japan, with a travelling troupe of unforgettable characters who walk the world each day but never leave a building. SJ Fowler's MUEUM is an essential artefact for our troubled times, proving that travel of the mind is always more powerful than the real thing.
        —Chris McCabe

A strange, absurd, difficult book by a hero of London’s poetry scene, MUEUM is disconcerting and enlightening. Reading it feels like walking beside the author through a lucid nightmare — as real and unreal as our own dreams, as illogical and packed with implication, but taken to horrendous extremes. At his best, Fowler shows us what would happen if we could freeze-frame and pursue the bits of our own daily lives that make it into our sleep states: a terrifying array of the small and menial alongside the vast, ghastly, and symbolic. Without affectation, in a voice very much his own, he comes close to the uncomfortable truth-telling of Ballard, McCarthy, Céline, and the rest of the minatory canon who form the backdrop to this remarkable fiction debut. 
        —Guy Stevenson, 
       LARB : The Los Angeles Review of
       Books

SJ Fowler is arguably the most influential, tirelessly generative and expansively generous English artist working in experimental literature today. No other contemporary writer is as comprehensively, and ambitiously, engaged with Europe’s histories of the avant-garde in addition to such vital participation in its present. 
        Whether in poetry, essays, fiction, painting, scrawling, sculpting, film, performance, theatre, sound, or in happenings without definition, his art draws its volatile experience of language into the mobile and embodied possibility of language as experience. Emerging in feral exploration between the poetry of Tom Raworth and the prose of László Krasznahorkai, this is a shape-shifting and omnivorous body of writing; uncompromisingly alive in the playful, violent, oblique and confrontational. When language chases and inhabits the mess of living it cannot sit neatly, and only, in a book (though there are nearing fifty publications to date) there is always more. In addition to his own work, Fowler is endlessly and inventively supporting other writers. 
        For a singular writer-as-artist-making to support and creatively involve so many others has a rare and historic momentum: from founding and organising the vast and inclusive European Poetry Festival (whilst also teaching, editing, curating, and collaborating) to fostering truly international communities and building events that have grown and changed a generation of UK avant-garde poetry. Returning in amidst such travelling energy to the page, the reader of such unique work will encounter the disarming gristle of being-as-struggle, but they will also find the resounding depths and laughter of a strange companionship in that struggle. No other contemporary UK writer is as comprehensively, and ambitiously, engaged with Europe’s histories of the avant-garde. Bracing challenge doubles mischievously as an embracing welcome within SJ Fowler’s experimentation that is, at its barbed and brilliant core, a language of extreme and unfamiliar honesty.
        —David Spittle