I Don't Want to Go to the Taj Mahal Page 5

  I’ve always liked the idea that writing is an activity that is intimately connected to death. That we write against death, to delay it somehow, or lessen the power of its hold over us. I’m not sure how effective it is, mind.

  Acknowledgements

  With thanks to my family, to Tariq and all at Repeater Books, and to lovely red wine.

  Repeater Books

  is dedicated to the creation of a new reality. The landscape of twenty-first-century arts and letters is faded and inert, riven by fashionable cynicism, egotistical self-reference and a nostalgia for the recent past. Repeater intends to add its voice to those movements that wish to enter history and assert control over its currents, gathering together scattered and isolated voices with those who have already called for an escape from Capitalist Realism. Our desire is to publish in every sphere and genre, combining vigorous dissent and a pragmatic willingness to succeed where messianic abstraction and quiescent co-option have stalled: abstention is not an option: we are alive and we don’t agree.