Talk to Strangers Every Day

Talk To Strangers Every Day punches through the nihilistic sludge of so much modern writing, more than any creative non-fiction I’ve read in years. It is at once profoundly funny and staunchly critical. The words are crisp and concise, flowing and jocular. This story does full justice to the pure creativity and vitality of the writer’s experience: an ex-journalist, working class, Glaswegian DJ and music fanatic living off the grid in the hearts of jazz and blues: New Orleans and Chicago. His training as a journalist sharpens any fuzzy sensational edges. The book is an unapologetic critique of capitalism, written from the belly of the modern beast, but it’s also so much more than that. The expansive writing birls us through a country rife with contradiction in all its exuberance and malnourished potential, its decay and moments fully lived. Despite a sharp eye on the skewed flourishing and brutality of an impossible economic system, it still holds aloft a certain joie de vivre, transmitted through its rippling prose. – Shane Johnstone is a poet, translator and linguist. He is the author of The Gods of Frequency (Arkbound Publishing 2020) and Govanhill Mythology (Palavro Press 2024). His poetry, translations and critical writing have been published extensively in Scotland, England and the US.