Join us at Imprints Booksellers for the launch of Chris Ames' short story collection, 'I Made This Just For You'.

The evening will be hosted by Jane Howard; Arts and Culture Editor at The Conversation.

About the book:

Written under the spell of writers like Catherine Lacey, Miranda July and Ling Ma, the characters in 'I Made This Just for You' are perfect avatars of modern life. They work in tech, take designer drugs, assemble Ikea furniture, pursue beauty matching, and rehabilitate their reputations – all while grappling with a perilous sense of unease, held hostage by economic focuses beyond their control. In the titular story, a new father simulates intimacy online in order to pay for his son’s operation. In 'Charlie & Charlie & Charlie', a genderless couple engages in a series of plastic surgeries to look more alike. ‘The Gesture’ follows man whose face has become a meme as he starts a creative agency for ‘repetition artists', while in ‘Good Light’ a woman lights up a joint and begins cleaning her apartment, only to dislodge a tangle of hair that proves more important that it initially appears. Other stories explore toxic masculinity, climate panic, the false promise of technology, and the fragile intensity of childhood.

A savage, sideways collection, I Made This Just for You marks the arrival of a profound new millennial voice and asks: How do we measure the distance between two people? How can we thrive within our own ceaseless routines? And how are we still drawn together, in spite of our messy, broken ways of knowing?

'I Made This Just for You' is published by Ultimo.

About Chris:

Chris Ames is a writer from California who lives in Melbourne with his wife and two children. His work has appeared in Electric Literature, HEAT, New Australian Fiction, No Tokens, The Saturday Paper, Wildness, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Hot Desk Fellowship at the Wheeler Centre and the winner of the 2024 Lord Mayor’s Creative Writing Award from the City of Melbourne, and the Victorian Premier's Unpublished Manuscript Award.

Contact the host of BOOK LAUNCH: I Made This Just For You