Flower - by Ed Atkins (Paperback)

About the Book

Flower is a book of realistic confessions, likes, dislikes, memories and no-brainer observations. It treats personal truth as unavailable, something that must be made up and convincing.

Book Synopsis

'I like eating cold, clammy wraps from big pharmacies that are open late and sell just a few foods like protein bars and powders.' Flower is a book of realistic admissions, likes, dislikes, memories and no-brainer observations, treating personal truth as unavailable - something that must be made up and convincing. Taking cues from confessional literature, his daughter's improvised games, poor internet writing and shitty AI, Ed Atkins, in his first work of non-fiction, equivocates between inanity and divinity, ease and pain, sentimentality and sterility. An anti-memoir, a list, a listless blur - Flower is a highly original, moving and absurd book by one of the most influential artists of his generation, formally inventive and disturbingly of our time.

Review Quotes

'Flower is propulsive and it doesn't let up. It's about vulnerability, sort of, and invincibility: it swings between these poles. It's about mortality, too, and in that sense humanity. To speak the book back at itself, I confess it did get to me.'
-- Isabel Waidner, author of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility

'Atkins, reflecting on the absence of humans in the exhibition, here favours the visceral impact of associated images and words, pumping the poetry-prose with lines that speak of our primeval instincts, needs and desires, in order to "seek empathic commons."'
-- ArtReview (praise for Old Food)

'Atkins' writing spores from the body, scraping through life matter's nervous stuff, leaving us agitated and eager. What's appealed to us is an odd mix of mimetic futures. Cancer exists, tattoos, squids, and kissing exist - all felt in the mouth as pulsing questions.'
-- Holly Pester, author of The Lodgers (praise for Old Food)

'Ed Atkins is a radical humanist who rediscovers the human in the most inhuman of states, when the usual supports - ego, language, people, technology, media, food - all fail. In Flower Atkins turns that abjection towards us, in a spleeny anti-autofiction that is his own version of Les Fleurs du Mal.'
-- Hal Foster, author of What Comes After Farce?

'Ed Atkins is the artist of ugly feelings - gruesome and smeared and depleted. But everything he does in his videos or paintings, I've always thought, he really does as a writer. He uses language as a system where everything gets reprocessed and misshapen - a unique and constant mislaying of tone that's as dizzying as it's exhilarating.'
-- Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future (praise for Old Food)

'Every sentence in this delightfully bizarre techno-memoir could stand alone on a page and command allure. Like splicing the miniature divulgences of Édouard Levé with the ominous bombast of Jenny Holzer, Flower makes automatic non-fiction feel like sci-fi, and it's instantly unforgettable.'
-- Blake Butler, author of Molly

'Finally someone is writing about all the food in drugstores. A paean of appreciation to these freakish purveyors of junk is how Atkins launches his amorous, granular unspooling of outrageous drives and appetites. Flower is the kind of book many people dream of writing: kudos to Atkins for getting it on the page.'
-- Moyra Davey, author of Index Cards

'I feel like a permanent conduit has been built between my brain and this book. Atkins is relentless, beautiful, hideously and angelically honest. Sometimes it brought me to tears and I'm not even sure why. It's the stuff most of us leave out, or wouldn't even know how to articulate. By which I mean this book has made so much other writing feel like propaganda. It's heroic. I'm not sure I'll ever recover from it.'
-- Luke Kennard, author of Notes on the Sonnets

'In its hysterical representation of Ed's demonic internalities, Flower surfs waves of experiencing typically suppressed, bypassed, ignored. What seems at first blush exemplary of contemporary literary modes of postmodern confession quickly cumulates into a free mobility of avid, jagged distraction at a comic-book clip as his exaggeratedly magnified self-awareness refracts and distends. A rhythmically unique flow and a robust "minor work" in the best possible sense: file Flower's barrage of Ed's "sexless kinks" under New Forms Of Poetry.'
-- Zach Phillips, Fievel is Glauque

'Violent, emetic, immoderate, improper, impure - that's to say it's the real thing. Atkins's prose, which may not be prose, adheres to Aragon's maxim "Don't think - write."'
-- Jonathan Meades (praise for Old Food)

About the Author

Ed Atkins is a British artist based in Copenhagen. He is best known for realistic computer-generated videos that expose and scrutinize otherwise unavailable feelings by the profanity of their artifice. In recent years he has presented solo shows at Kunsthaus Bregenz, Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Castello di Rivoli in Turin, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Serpentine Gallery in London, among others, with a survey show at Tate Britain opening in spring 2025. He is the author of A Primer for Cadavers (2016), Old Food (2019) and Flower (2025), all published by Fitzcarraldo Editions.