Details

• Author: Zachary Smiley
• Pages: 190
• ISBN: 979-8-9916364-0-7
• Publication: 2025

About the Book

In this haunting meditation on art, death, and intention, The Joke follows K., a failed artist whose abandoned thesis project—a grotesque mechanical puppet—has left him living with his aunt in quiet desperation. After inheriting her house following her death, K. begins meticulously constructing an elaborate suicide machine in his new apartment, all while wrestling with memories of his artistic past and contemplating an alternative plan: a final road trip to the West. As K. obsesses over the purity of his intended death, he finds himself drawn into fevered contemplations of reincarnation, quantum mechanics, and the possibility of eternal recurrence through the spinning halo of a chainsaw.

With prose that moves between philosophical reflection and hallucinatory detail, Smiley crafts a darkly comic exploration of artistic purpose, the aesthetics of suicide, and the tension between mechanical intention and organic resistance. The Joke asks what it means to create something truly purposeful in a world where even our deaths can become mere objects of art.

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«But what K. will have done is not art. His life is soon the enclosed circle of a chain of metal serration revved throughout eternity. This circle goes back and forward in time after an unattainable speed so pure it transforms into the halo you imagine decorates the heads of apathetic sleepy angels, the deathtrap was a chainsaw thrust against the flatness of the world, it can never stop…»