Novelist Roesing Ape’s first book for Chapultepec Press reveals Kentucky’s most-beloved son, Job, consecrating 400 acres of pine cones and leaves with all that he has. A Beautiful Woman is a true Odysseus tale of one man’s visceral struggle to reach an existence called home. – 2004

Forward | Author’s Notes on the Second Edition

I hate forwards. This is the first forward I’ve ever written. It’s a pile of shit where I get to reflect on the hot mess of a book I made 15 years ago. This book is about tearing things apart. It’s about suicide slow. It’s about living with self hatred while living with self hatred. It’s about Obsessive Compulsive Depression. The book started out as a joke – a novel in November gag I was doing with a pal as an excuse to hang out and drink at a coffee shop too much, where he liked a girl. We were to write 50,000 words in 30 days. So I literally wrote the first 30,000 words to be the most ridiculously wordy text I could manage – zero efficiency. Can I use ten words to say what three words would do? You got it. Can I get rid of a bunch of contractions? Yes. So this book is pretty painful to read at times. It wasn’t written for you. It wasn’t written for anything, and so everything went in. Largest mental turd I ever planted. It’s so fake it’s real. The dreams are real. The hallucinations are real. The whining is real. The urge to tear everything apart, to tear my body apart in spite of its talent and beauty, to rip it up, shred it and throw it in the face of the lying, shitty world that produced it – that is real. I only got to 30,000 words in that first month, as try as I might to shove words on the pages, I’m a slow typer and lazy. So then I spent a year writing the last 20,000 words. And then drunk one night a local publisher who knew I knew artsy types asked if I knew anyone who wrote a book. And the rest is not history, since I don’t exist on Wikipedia yet. Enjoy. Or don’t. I mean the sun’s gonna blow up who really cares? -roesingApe 12/12/18

Available in digital format and paperback.