The debut novella by Aaron Petrovich and first release from
Hotel St. George Press

Click here to read an excerpt.

"Aaron Petrovich's The Session is an innovative and compelling novella in dialogue . . . a sly mediation on truth and identity."
--Chicago Reader, Spring Books Special Issue

"Petrovich's dialogue is linguistically playful, pithy, and flawlessly paced. Together with Benes's illustrations, the result is a darkly imaginative work of art."
--PopMatters

"Petrovich draws vivid characters and establishes real tensions seemingly out of thin air. The Session is a novel made up of the sorts of ideas that will linger in your memory for days or maybe weeks."
--Miami Herald

"Much like Beckett, Petrovich aims at the accretion of atmosphere through the attrition of coherence and convention . . . to evoke a sensibility of dark, poetic unmeaning."
--L Magazine

"Petrovich is Beckett's organ."
--Andrei Codrescu

Frantic, stunning, and with a subversive intelligence Aaron Petrovich's Keatonesque heroes, Detectives Smith and Smith, stumble upon a bizarre new religion while following the trail of a murdered mathematician's missing organs. Their investigation to discover the truthÑabout the mathematician murder, the mob of men and women who may have eaten him, and ultimately the nature of truth, sanity, and identityÑleads them into a lunatic asylum they may never leave. Writing in a pitch-perfect language reminiscent of Beckett, Chandler, and Pinter, Petrovich elevates rapid-fire banter to an hysterical musical litany that carries the detectives, and the reader, right along with it.

Aaron Petrovich is a writer of fiction and theatre living in Brooklyn, New York. He is a regular contributor to the Exquisite Corpse and associate editor at Akashic Books. His theatrical works have appeared in the Midtown International Theatre Festival, Manhattan Theatre Source, Improvised and Otherwise (a festival of sound and form), the Estrogenius Festival, and the New York Solo Play Lab.

Vilem Benes was born in Zlin in the former Czechoslovakia. He moved as a young man to the U.S. with his family. He currently lives and paints in Brooklyn, New York.

Hotel St. George is an online literary and arts quarterly featuring original fiction, artwork, short films, music, soundscapes, spoken word and secret histories, all occupying carefully designed rooms in an ever-expanding virtual hotel. Our imprint is dedicated to publishing work that playfully fuse the formal craftsmanship of art books with the substantive content of dynamic, modern prose.