Fitzcarraldo signs Craze's The Report

Fitzcarraldo Editions has signed The Report by Joshua Craze which investigates his decade-long experience working as a conflict researcher in Sudan and South Sudan.

Publisher Jacques Testard acquired world rights to The Report: A Report direct from the author. The book will appear in 2023, as part of Fitzcarraldo Editions' essay series.

Shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize for first-time writers, the book will explore the very act of reporting, “revealing the poetry of factual creation, and the way knowledge and facts are put to use by the international community”.

The publisher said: “The Report will track a report on its picaresque adventure through the world, from South Sudan to DC, and report back on the spies, soldiers, and diplomats it meets on the way. An investigation into the status and stakes of knowledge today, The Report will critically assess the quality of information that can be acquired from vehicle breakdowns in the middle of swamps and the late-night confessions of Dubai oil traders, while probing the ontology of bureaucratic acronyms and the veracity of rebel groups invented in the boardrooms of Langley.”

Craze, whose writing on art, war, and literature has appeared in n+1, Cabinet, and the Guardian, said: “I’ve spent the last decade mouthing bureaucratic platitudes in diplomatic meetings. Sometimes, the words turned to stones in my mouth. In all that time, a steady diet of Fitzcarraldo Editions was one of the main ballasts for my conviction that language can both reflect on the absurdities of the contemporary world, and take a scalpel to them. I’m overjoyed to put The Report on the same shelf as the books by Enard, Alexievich, and Stepanova that shaped it. I hope that The Report’s distinctive contribution to this conversation is to report back from a Platonic world of spreadsheets and diplomatic meetings that occurs in hardened compounds and undisclosed locations. As Dick Cheney once said, this is a reality-based community, in which we make our own reality, and I wish to welcome you to our world. I’m here to report back about it.”

Testard added: “Joshua Craze is an exceptional writer. In The Report, he strives to uncover the folly of humanity with humour, style and erudition. I am very glad we have found each other and could not be more excited to be publishing him at Fitzcarraldo Editions.”