Works by
Joseph Suglia
(Screenwriter, Producer, Writer)

Fiction

• Watch Out (2006, Revision September 22, 2008)
  Watch Out is the story of Jonathan Barrows, “Professor of Intelligent Thinking.” Abandoned since birth on an alien planet called "Earth," Barrows travels West by train to Benton Harbor, Michigan -- a town with "a well-deserved inferiority complex" -- in search of the Unholy Grail -- a teaching position at Benton Harbor Community College ("the only college that would grant Me an interview"). Able to love and desire only himself, Jonathan Barrows finds himself surrounded and hounded by the residents of Benton Harbor and inexorably descends into a world of lunatics. Every human being, according to Barrows, is a form of nourishment. But who will end up being devoured?
  
  "A new version of my masterpiece, Watch Out, will be released in August 2008. This definitive edition will contain a number of passages that were initially considered too "explosive," too disturbing, too scandalous for publication. The restored text represents my writerly vision in a way that the first edition did not. The changes are so radical that one could, with justice, speak of two entirely different volumes."

-- Joseph Suglia

Information on the upcoming movie, inspired by Joseph Suglia's novel, Watch Out. Expected release date of 2009.  See YouTube trailers here and here.

• Years of Rage (2005)
  Inspired by the Columbine High Massacre, Years of Rage takes place inside of the head of a schoolboy who is bent on murdering his classmates. We, as readers, see what he sees. We think what he thinks. We feel what he feels. We enter a nightmarish world in which it is impossible to separate objective reality from the phantoms of the mind, a world where there are no limits, a world where desire gears toward destruction, a world where love merges with violence. The novel speeds at an unrelenting pace toward an explosive climax, never giving readers a chance to catch their breath.

Non-fiction

• Holderlin And Blanchot On Self-Sacrifice (2004)
  A scene of self-sacrifice can never be staged or secured. The work of Friedrich Hölderlin, arguably one of the most profound writers of the German Enlightenment, supports this idea in fascinating ways. Much of Hölderlin's critical reception, however, has the poet saying the exact opposite. Joseph Suglia counters the dominant critical reception of Hölderlin's Empedokles fragments, which would transform the tragic hero's experience of mortality into a project that would be accomplished in the name of the transcendent reconciliation of disparate spheres. This book also focuses on a densely detailed consideration of the work of the great French critic and literary artist, Maurice Blanchot, whose own treatment of self-sacrifice exists in closer proximity to Hölderlin's than the former appears to recognize. For Blanchot, it is argued, self-sacrifice is "a sacrifice that is an engagement with, in, and for language, a sacrifice that is both madness and mystery."