69 THINGS TO DO WITH A DEAD PRINCESS BY STEWART HOME
Canongate, Edinburgh 2002

Synopsis
This is where the novel has a nervous breakdown. Anna Noon is a twenty-year-old student with a taste for perverse sex involving an enigmatic older man and a ventriloquist's dummy. Anna lives in Aberdeen, and her sex life revolves around the ancient stone circles in this region. The sublime grandeur of the stones provides a backdrop against which Anna is able to act out her provocative psychodramas.

This is a book about the body in which the carnal is a manifestation of consciousness: a book in which it is impossible to distinguish the ancient from the post-modern. Drawing on literary modernism and recent continental philosophy, as well as pulp appropriations, 69 Things to Do With a Dead Princess illustrates that schizophrenia may well be the only sane response to capitalism.

The Quotes
'He is the most interesting writer to come out of England for quite a while.' Harper's

'Stewart Home is heir to Richard Allen's '70s Skinhead ... revolutionary theory has never been easier to read.' Select

'Relentlessly cliched and driven by a slippery sense of humour, Home's deliberately bad writing does for the novel form what Viz does for the comic strip.' Times Literary Supplement

'The stuff of which cults are made.' Time Out

'Literary provocateur Stewart Home marries the pulp pornography of his previous skinhead novels with fundamentally more "highbrow" attributes--literary criticism, political theory, and other avenues of philosophical discourse--to produce the style he describes affectedly as "proletarian postmodernism." In this latest work Home has muted his characteristic prankster plagiarism, choosing instead to cue his inspiration more conventionally by way of literary influence. Ann Quin is the most evident influence guiding 69 Things, as made apparent in an opening line that recalls Quin's opening to Berg and made blatant when narrator Anna Noon describes how her prosaic inspiration should avoid certain authors and "detour instead towards Ann Quin." When Anna, a twenty-year-old university student...'
From Cory Weber piece on Stewart Home's 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess in The Review of Contemporary Fiction June 22, 2003, Volume: 23 Issue: 2 Page: 143.

Comments about Dead Princess left on MySpace:
'You are the most fantastic, fucked up book I have ever had the pleasure of randomly picking up...an advert for the book shops of airport departure lounges you are, if only they contained more like you...' Claire, London, England.

'This book was absolutely crazy, I came to the bookstore and was randomly searching titles and I picked it up and never put it down. I think my jaw was on the floor by the time I was done reading it. I don't think I will ever read anything like it ' Jenny-Lyn, Manchester, New Hampshire, USA.

'Hands down my favorite book. Amazing story how I came upon it... my best friend cleans an English man's house, and he had this book out on his coffee table by mistake. I stopped in while she was cleaning, picked it up and started reading it. She had no idea what the book was, but I had asked her to ask him where he got it. The guy was mortified she was asking about the book, and quite embarrassed, she was pretty upset at me too.. but I finally got my copy in a tiny book store in NYC. At that point in my life, it was the first book I had sat down to read in 5 years.' Jenny Spanks, Lawtown, Massachusetts, USA.

'I almost got suspended from school for holding Dead Princess up high during reading time...' Devil Girl, Davenport, Florida, USA.

Kevin O'Neill essay about 69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess

Stewart Home on his Necrocard (anyone for sex after death?)

Books & Writing

Bibliography