A screenplay that predicts the future. A terrorist cult destined to destroy something they can't remember. A projectionist trying to find her way through a story she's suddenly aware she's living. A loser who always seems to be in the wrong place at the right time. And the disparate particles and people populating a slowly-collapsing, not-so-far-from-now world where movie theaters no longer exist, one percent of the population is dead, and everything we do is surveilled and advertised. This is Sunflower -- the final film by Simeon Wolpe.
Readers of Sunflower, Tex Gresham’s brilliant new novel, will probably find themselves thinking of Gravity’s Rainbow, House of Leaves, and Infinite Jest. But in truth, Sunflower is something else, a beast with its own distinct brand of madness. Bluntly satirical of Trump-era politics, Sunflower takes you on an acid trip disguised as a conspiracy theory, working with equal skill in realist, absurdist, and metafictional modes to make sure you’re lost in a funhouse you won’t want to leave. In Gresham’s fictional universe, the world might end while you're watching a movie about the end of the world, and maybe you wrote the script or maybe your double wrote the script, and even if the theater is filled with people who won't hesitate to blow your brains out if you laugh at all the wrong moments, it won't make any difference, since the book is filled with all the right moments.
––Stephen-Paul Martin, author of The Ace of Lightning
If a bodybuilder were to astral project herself into both Werner Herzog’s cameraman/cinematography and Middlemarch, it would produce a morbidly rakish sunflower of the same heliotropic anti- equivalent as Tex Gresham’s Sunflower. And, if an intern were to work in Gresham’s library of chapters and deleted scenes, it would confuse The Library of Congress for Netflix.
—Vi Khi Nao, author of Fish In Exile and The Vegas Dilemma
Tex Gresham has blurred the line between satirical deconstruction of postmodern novels and sentimental love letters to cinema. Simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking, Sunflower is an intricate mystery that will leave readers seeking to mend their broken relationships and their humanity through a shared fondness for the silver screen. Sunflower is this summer’s biggest literary blockbuster hit! You’ll laugh. You’ll cry. You’ll dissolve.
––Dan Eastman, author of Watertown
Sunflower is virtuosic, gargantuan, totally unafraid. Experimental and wild, beautiful and heartbreaking, serious and hilarious––I think Tex is here to stay.
––Lindsay Lerman, author of I’m From Nowhere and What Are You
If Paul Thomas Anderson wrote a novel based on a film by David Foster Wallace with a screenplay by Thomas Pynchon about dark Hollywood, mind-bending conspiracy, the slapstick horror of America and sheer insanity of existence, these would be some in a long line of flavors the sum total of which might come partway to encapsulating Sunflower. Hilarious, repulsive, enthralling, shocking, breathtaking, masterful—Tex Gresham's magnum opus is a novel you will use all your adjectives attempting to describe; a dense, multi-character tale in which each place and person, every moment and word, are connected through myriad layers across space and time. The effect is staggering. This book will swallow you whole then spit you back out, dazed, bewildered, transformed—hungering for more.
––Philip Elliot, author of Nobody Move and Porno Valley
I’ve tried to make Sunflower into a feature––not a Netflix series––and people called me a moron. So the least I can do is say, “Read this book and imagine it as a really good movie that I would make.” Because it’s so good that I wanted to make it into a movie––not a Netflix series.
––Alan Smithee, legendary Hollywood director
