In his note, Jackson also warns us that “sometimes it’s been difficult to tell memories from fantasies”. Or perhaps are they too much detailed to be true ? When we start to read it, we are indeed confronted to the reality perceived by an unnamed young male character who narrates his own story using the first person “I” later in the book we learn that his name is Jeff and we are introduced to several events of his childhood which are depicted with astounding precision, which are extremely detailed and which therefore seem authentic memories of the homodiegetic narrator/autor. Before we start to read, Jeff Jackson tells us in a note that “this novel is based on the journals kept growing up”, we thus expect to read his story from childhood to adulthood.

Mira Corpora is both an autobiographical and fictional work. Jackson is a strong, powerful storyteller, occupying the space where Huck Finn, Dennis Cooper, Lana Del Ray, and Gus Van Sant meet.« Passing off what might be true as fiction seems a better vocation to me than passing off what is quite possibly fiction as truth » – Robert Frank 'Jeff Jackson's 'Mira Corpora' is a moving elegy to lost childhood in the dark recesses of America, where both magic and bleakness frequently occur. Jackson is a strong, powerful storyteller, occupying the space where Huck Finn, Dennis Cooper, Lana Del Ray, and Gus Van Sant meet.' It’s the overarching sensibility that also puts Mira Corpora in a unique group of books that can only be dubbed Punk Lit. ‘ mesmerizing debut, which reads like some cross between Bruno Schulz and the backstories of random characters from Penelope Spheeris’ 1984 film Suburbia. I hope the book finds the serious readers who are out there waiting for this kind of fiction to hit them in the face.’

‘It's fine work in its manic pacing and its summoning of certain cultural emblems. 'There are few coming-of-age-esque novels that don’t make me feel like I’m being lied to, manipulated into caring to the point where I can’t care at all. 'So powerful it reaffirms my belief that the contemporary can still do remarkable things' The prose works like the expressionless masks worn by killers in horror films.’ ‘Style is pre-eminent in Jeff Jackson's eerie and enigmatic debut.

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Mira Corpora by Jeff Jackson