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Decadence
Paperback
Biographies GeneralHumorLetters & Essays
Publisher Price: $18.95
ISBN13: 9781771967136
Publisher: Biblioasis
Published: Jul 7 2026
Pages: 264
Weight: 0.62
Height: 0.70 Width: 5.20 Depth: 8.10
Language: English
Finalist for the 2026 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction
The genre of memoir is bullshit (as I humbly posit). No one actually lives like they are moving along some grand Freytag's triangle. Rather, we live within isolated instances, specific struggles and victories, which, when compiled, form a narrative.--Richard Kelly Kemick
In Decadence, Richard Kelly Kemick's accidental memoir of a sort, the author ranges widely through his myriad preoccupations and obsessions--volleyball, municipal landfills, dogs, high school plays, Christmas villages, love--out of which the shape of a unique sensibility is revealed. Reminiscent of the three Davids--Rakoff, Sedaris, and Wallace--these essays accrete into a portrait of a man trying to make sense of a world in which there are no goddamn rules; and yet one in which every action has sometimes profound consequences. A book of intelligence and care and kindness and humour and yearning and the occasional epiphany, Decadence gathers up from the odds and ends of living what makes a modern life--quiet and desperate as it may at times be--worth celebrating.
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