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The boring boring boring boring by Zach Plague — A Long View
Zach Plague's debut is a deliberately fractured art-school novel that earns its provocative title — a book that rewards patience with genuine formal invention and a sharp eye for creative-class absurdity.
Small press fiction occupies a strange position in the reading landscape. The books are easy to overlook, often priced accessibly, and almost never reviewed in outlets that move units. Yet some of the most formally adventurous work in American fiction over the past two decades has come out of exactly these operations — Featherproof, Dzanc, Two Dollar Radio, Dorothy. Zach Plague's boring boring boring boring belongs in that conversation.
The title is a provocation with a thesis buried inside it. Repetition, in Plague's hands, is not emptiness — it is a kind of pressure. The word 'boring' repeated six times on a cover does something to your expectations before you open to page one, and the novel is aware of that. It is playing with the reader's tolerance from the first moment of contact. That is a risky opening move for a debut, and it mostly pays off.
What the book captures well — and what makes it worth recommending to a specific kind of reader — is the texture of a certain creative-community experience. The art school as setting is well-trodden, but Plague avoids the nostalgia trap. The characters are not romanticized. The manifestos are funny because they are accurate. Anyone who has sat in a critique and watched someone defend incoherence as intention will recognize the landscape immediately.
From a production standpoint, Featherproof has always prioritized design intelligence over material luxury. The books are paperback, modestly printed, and built to be read rather than displayed. boring boring boring boring fits that ethos — the typographic experimentation on the page requires a clean, flexible layout, and the press delivers that without overproducing it. The object itself is honest about what it is.
The reader this book fits is someone who came up through zine culture, studied art or literature in a small program, or simply has a high tolerance for fiction that asks more questions than it answers. For that reader, this is a quietly significant debut from a writer with a genuine point of view — which, in a market full of competent and forgettable first novels, is worth noting.