An experimental flash collection published by Otis Books|Seismicity Editions in 2020, translated into Italian by Digressioni Editore in 2024, and reissued by Indirect Books in 2026. Purchase the new 2026 edition: Amazon, the publisher, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble, and Powell’s. You can find the Italian edition on the publisher’s site.
Elenco, the Italian edition out with Digressioni Editore (2024). A review here.
“A desolate, prismatic, and exquisitely written array of American nightmares.” Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying
“Strikingly written and told with urgency…” Wendy J. Fox, BuzzFeed
“Christopher Linforth’s splendid Directory is composed of shrapnel selves, both aesthetic and existential, each shard sharp, concentrated, biting, brutal, devastating, and astonishing.” Lance Olsen, author of My Red Heaven
“Christopher Linforth’s Directory offers prose that twins no others. Original crisp writing, taking its readers on an unforgettable journey, through portals of the unknown. A wonderful, surprising, powerful read.” Kim Chinquee, author of Wetsuit and Shot Girls
“…refreshing at times, shocking, disorienting and puzzling at others, but throughout the entire book you follow a thread of tender humanity that begs you to identify with a perspective that squeezes, prods and stabs at the heart in a multiplicity of ways.” Levi Noe, Bending Genres
“Directory’s rogues’ gallery of rakes, rapscallions, and rascals, of hoydens, harridans, and doyennes, gestures semaphorically at abandoned subjectivity. This is evinced in this collection’s recurrence of apparatuses, an unpacking of the colonization of the human by technologies, particular analog ones — pre-cellular telecom and pre-digital photography — familiar in the films, photography, and paintings of David Lynch.” Sean Hooks, Necessary Fiction
“…what is distinctive about the book…its use of the story-fragment to both exploit brevity as a self-sufficient narrative strategy and to organize a series of such brief stories so that the result is a work that has structural coherence without strictly conforming to a pre-established form.” Daniel Green, The Reading Experience
“Linforth’s elegant and powerful prose invites the reader to join a chorus of collective voices that explore questions of identity, the constant uncomfortableness of growing up and the painful legacy of abuse.” María Alejandra Barrios, Smokelong Quarterly.
“…ambitious and highly experimental work…” Andrea Pozzali, Mangialibri
“Linforth’s prose is both elegant and brutally sharp. His stories depict trauma not to entertain but to show the rawness of its disruption, the scars of loss that never disappear.” Don J. Rath, Southern Review of Books
New Edition: Read essays about the rerelease of Directory at Lit Mag News and Necessary Fiction. Read a review at the Southern Review of Books.
Italian Edition: Read a review in Mangialibri.
First Edition: Read some interviews (3:AM Magazine, Fear No Lit, 12 or 20 Questions, Heavy Feather Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn) & a Story Prize Instagram & some kind words & a review at Bending Genres & a review at The Reading Experience & a review at Smokelong Quarterly & a review at Necessary Fiction, & a short feature over at The Next Best Book, on this list of Entropy’s new releases, & this BuzzFeed article, & a Monkeybicycle If My Book.
