A novel by Travis Nichols

May 28, 2013 • 5.5 x 8.25 • 256 pages • 978-1-56689-321-3

An always-outsider crashes a wedding blog in this darkly comic novel of internet obsession, unrequited love, and isolation.

Charli and Nico’s wedding blog has an uninvited guest: a commenter convinced the bride is being romanced by the brother of the groom. To save her from a terrible mistake, he assumes multiple identities on multiple message boards, sharing, in an extended, epic blog comment, his fears for Charli, his outrage at being thwarted, and the romance, years ago in his analog past, that first attracted his meddlesome care.

Cranky, hilarious, and incisive, The More You Ignore Me takes on Internet etiquette, the distortions of voyeurism, and the incessant, expansive flow of words that may not be able to staunch loneliness, but holds out the hope of talking it to death.

About the Author

Travis Nichols was born in Ames, Iowa. He attended the University of Georgia and the University of Massachusetts, where he earned an MFA in poetry. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Iowa (Letter Machine Editions) and See Me Improving (Copper Canyon Press), as well as two novels, Off We Go Into the Wild Blue Yonder and The More You Ignore Me (Coffee House Press). From 2008 – 2012 he was associate editor of the Poetry Foundation’s website and editor of its blog, Harriet. He now works at Greenpeace in Washington, DC.

Thanks to a 2013 ADA Access Improvement Grant administered by VSA Minnesota for the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, this title is also formatted for screen readers which make text accessible to the blind and visually impaired. To purchase this title for use with a screen reader please call (612) 338-0125 or email us at info@coffeehousepress.org.

Reviews

“The More You Ignore Me is a novel that will not be ignored. Travis Nichols channels the energies of such exemplary screeders past as Gogol’s Poprishchin, Nabokov’s Kinbote, Lish’s Lish, and Nicholson Baker’s woe-beset anthologist, Paul Chowder. Lynksys181, a kind of latter-day Gollum, cries out: ‘I know I have love to give! Who will dare to take it?’ Reader, you should be the one.” —Justin Taylor

“With this hilarious and tragic novel, Travis Nichols has captured the menace and pathos and ridiculousness and dead-seriousness of the Internet so well that now I feel a little bit concerned for him. This narrator’s voice will resonate in your mind in unexpected ways forever. You've been warned!” —Emily Gould

“An experimental novel of obsession and violation that makes Nicholson Baker and Mark Leyner look positively banal.” —Kirkus

“The unhinged narrator of Nichols’s amusing second novel . . . is a self-styled ‘online justice-seeker and truth-teller.’ . . . Nichols writes brawny prose and has an easy touch with humor.’ —Publishers Weekly

“The More You Ignore Me, beyond being a farcical joyride of a read, also serves as a critical study of the monopolizing role the internet plays in both fostering and sating the human appetite for connection. . . . In an age in which social life can be lived through a screen entirely, to what extent to we indulge?” —KGB Bar Lit Magazine

“In linksys181, Nichols has engaged in a flabbergasting act of literary ventriloquism. . . . The More You Ignore Me is a Notes from Underground by way of the Huffington Post.” —Seattle Stranger

“Nichols is brilliant in capturing the wheedling tone, aggravating escalation and stultifying self-involvement of Internet trolls. . . . Raw enough to bring the dark laughter of recognition.” —Star Tribune

“I had never read a novel so innovative, and Nichols wrote a character that still haunts me. I realized I loved it, and recommended it to anyone who came into the bookstore looking for an unconventional read.” —Lit Reactor

“Travis Nichols’ The More You Ignore Me features two of my favorite literary devices, an unreliable narrator and ambitious, experimental form (the novel is one long blog comment) in one of the year’s most ambitious and thought provoking novels.” —Largehearted Boy

“What Mr. Nichols does brilliantly is examine the inner workings of a delusional and grandiose individual . . . on the darker side of the internet: the disconnect that longs deeply for connection, the disparate cry for acknowledgement.” —New York Journal of Books

“Want a reminder what you can do with fiction? Told entirely as a blog post comment from the perspective of a dude crashing a wedding website, this psychologically-driven novel is what you're looking for.” —Bustle

“Nichols’ prose especially shines when relating the narrator’s ambitious project . . . Linksys181 may only have found his voice in the digital realm . . . but the ultimate roots of his discontent is something altogether understandable: a desire and passion for meaningful human connection.” —NYZZYVA

“The Ignatius J. Reilly of the Internet age. Prepare yourself for an entertaining read that is funny, creepy, unsettling, sad, and super entertaining.” —WORD Bookstore Tumblr

“Imagine, for a moment, an Internet troll who writes in complete sentences. Who melds the political fire of a revolutionary with the linguistic precision of a poet. Who peppers his rants with references to Norman Mailer, Buster Keaton, and the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Do that and you might be able to anticipate the spectacular, deranged protagonist of Travis Nichols’ very funny second novel, The More You Ignore Me.” —Fanzine

“There’s something admirable about the way Nichols allows his character the indignity of his prickly tendencies without validating them via sympathetic flashback. . . . The More You Ignore Me reminds us that exploring this sense of failure can itself become the basis for art that is as alive as it is bleak.” —Bookforum

“Nichols . . . actually gets the tone and pitch of the troll down pat. This is a stunning book.” —Volta

“Addressing the internet’s ability to unite and divide us at once, magnified by the emboldening power of anonymity and the persuasive gravity of voyeurism, Nichols presents one more serious consideration of personal bias assisted and afflicted by technology.” —Denver Examiner

“The novels’s narrator, ably fashioned by Nichols . . . possesses all of Ahab’s obsessiveness but none of his courage, can best be imagined as Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man with Internet access. . . . Nichols’s book is a contribution to the body of obsessive literature.” —Philadelphia Review of Books