Amsterdam launch of Silk Handkerchiefs
Thursday 24 September, 8pm–1am
De Nieuwe Anita, Frederik Hendrikstraat 111

Silk Handkerchiefs is the first in a trilogy of short comedy novels by writer and painter Paul Haworth.
Wank to Jeremy Kyle, postie wink, suicidal, hit on woman old enough to be my mother, like a lubricious satyr, nigh-on assaulted by a male admirer, lying in a pool of urine…shit like this, it never used to happen to me, I swear. Now it were the story of my life.
Narrator Alex ‘Abs’ Brenchley is unafraid to tell, show and give all. Alongside episodes about his youth at Westminster School, sexcapades in St James’s Park and Victoria Station, and life as one of the art world’s so-called Nutty Solitary Men, Silk Handkerchiefs weaves its story of one fateful day in the life of Alex Brenchley…a day of tragedy, violence and the promise of LOVE.
Whilst growing up in ‘the eternal gulag that is the British boarding school’, Alex’s antidote to his sense of abandonment was sex – sex, sex, sex – and plenty drugs to go along. He then cleans up his act and commits himself to scholasticism and art at the University of Oxford, only to discover that this wholesome life is a lie – the emperor’s new clothing. But as Abs attempts to reconnect with the realness of his old ways – and his old crowd – he learns that he is not the man he used to be…
The character and story of Silk Handkerchiefs have been developed through radio shows, YouTube videos and short stories written by Haworth since 2003. A performance of Silk Handkerchiefs took place at the Barbican Art Gallery in London in July 2008, as part of The House of Viktor & Rolf. Alex Brenchley’s misadventures will be continued in two sequels.
The narration richly fuses Cockney, hip-hop slang and verbose Dickensian English. The book offers a delirious account of 21st-century anxiety at its most extreme and hysterical and captures the London of 2007 as if it was only yesterday.
Silk Handkerchiefs – hilarious, ridiculous, true!
Published September 2009 by TRUE TRUE TRUE, Amsterdam
96 pages, 18 × 11 cm, €10
ISBN 978-94-90006-02-0

http://www.truetruetrue.org