An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychology experiment. What could possibly go wrong?

In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized leather bag, sitting silently at the back of the lecture hall, over a series of Fall lectures?

The role, eagerly accepted by our narrator, soon yields unexpected consequences, from a professor of post-humanism developing a research question of her own—can you fall in love with someone secreted away inside a black bag?—to the actor’s childhood friend forming an unnerving vision for monetizing this bizarre new situation . . . 

A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter romance, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.
 
Contributor Bio(s): Luke Kennard is an award-winning poet and novelist. In 2014 he was named one of the Next Generation Poets by the Poetry Book Society in their once-per-decade list. His collection, Cain, was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and described by Alan Hollinghurst as “the cleverest and funniest thing I’ve read this year,” and Notes on the Sonnets won the Forward prize for Best Poetry Collection in 2021. The Transition, his first novel, was a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime and longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize. The Book of Jonah, his new poetry collection, will be published by Picador in 2025. Luke Kennard lives in Birmingham, UK, where he teaches Creative Writing at Birmingham University.