How can a person speak when they lose faith in the authority of their voice? One night on the cusp of winter, a man sits alone, in silence, and begins to lay words on an empty page. He speaks of ancestry and stymied ambitions, of confusions and doubts, of what he despises and what he adores. He speaks of scripture and commandments, of conformity and evangelism; he speaks of the lust and the shame that have led him away from a doctrinaire upbringing, and of the love that has sheltered him in his spiritual exile. And yet, in order to speak of these things, he finds he must speak back to things he has already said: so he returns to his earlier words and casts doubt on their veracity, to elucidate the implications that were lost when he wrote them down.

Nathan Knapp’s Daybook marks the arrival of a blazing new talent in contemporary literature, the Gerald Murnane of the American South. In the sinuous, incantatory style of a fugue in prose—and teasing out the tensions between carnality and theology, desire and disgrace—Knapp embarks on a dreamlike exploration of life’s most essential, enigmatic questions. The result is self-conscious, self-lacerating, and self-deprecating, both deeply serious and darkly funny: a testament to what a voice can say when it speaks without intent, with only a hunch that it might create meaning.