While collecting the scattered stories of his parents’ entangled passages to the United States, the narrator begins to record the material onto videocassettes through a series of cutting and grafting, splicing footage of his present dislocation and overlaying on the audio track the polyphonic voices of his inherited exiles.
Spring 2025, from CLASH Books
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“An auto-fiction pastiche of video recordings, VHS splices the experience of being the child of political exiles from two different countries into an impressionistic book that reads like a YouTube algorithm that truly knows what you want to see next. Not exactly a novel and not exactly a collection, Campanioni crafts everything from getting a new pair of glasses to swiping a metro card into a seminal experience. Indeed, these are the moments that make up life; he captures the sense we’ve all had when doing something ordinary—like riding the train, or wondering if it’s better to be a back or a belly sleeper—and it suddenly, because of the right light or the perfect background music, feels like a movie. Deft, poetic, and surprising.”
— Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature
“A dazzling novel that takes the now-staid modes of much autofiction and turns them inside out. VHS is incantatory, wholly original and alive. A bravura performance with a voyeuristic glee.”
— Ernesto Mestre-Reed, author of Sacrificio
“A brilliant lyrical and philosophical adventure. A novel as a screen capture, a guidebook, a reimagination, a reenactment … all those lightning connections of a brain running hot. The mix of tenderness and depth. VHS gives me everything I want.”
— Nate Lippens, author of My Dead Book and Ripcord
“Chris Campanioni has created yet another sexy and stunning book. VHS defies categorization. It revels in its rebellion. It is both nostalgic and visionary, an expertly crafted balance between the surreal and achingly familiar dimensions of memory. As raw and unapologetic as Reinaldo Arenas, Campanioni is a singular talent; a director, cinematographer, poet and superb storyteller rolled into one. VHS is pop. It’s retro. And it has all the makings of a cult classic.”
— John Manuel Arias, author of Where There Was Fire
“Campanioni’s confident, everything-everywhere-all-at-once consciousness refuses to fully take shape or offer clear explanations. Their aesthetics is to ride on desire, memory, and geography, always staying ahead of themselves. This kind of experiment feels antithetical to the more structured discursive forms I’m used to, yet the montage and polyvocality of VHS’s narrative both dazzles and inspires me to try something similar. Perhaps a good way to approach a draft would be to spill out memories and future plans, let associations run to their most eerie edges, and then puzzle together the strongest moments into something that echoes Campanioni’s form and tone.”
— Hantian Zhang, The Adroit Journal
“A collage of dreamlike, visceral images—an experimental art-house movie in shifting literary form. … The immigrant experience is a theme as old as time in American literature, but Campanioni breathes fresh life into this tradition through clever turns of phrase, surprising depths of the narrator’s inner life, and a steady hand with prose and genre alike. VHS is not a rollercoaster but a contemplative train journey—a shifting, colorful, and surreal landscape of cities, persons, and memories going by—to bring you out of the grey dullness of everyday life.”
— Victoria Lilly, Independent Book Review
“Campanioni (A and B and Also Nothing) offers an entertaining if messy collage of piquant observations about the nature of memory and storytelling.”
— Publishers Weekly