WINNER OF THE VERMONT BOOK AWARD IN FICTION

“Revenge of the Scapegoat made me bounce-laugh so hard my cheeks and belly kept jiggling while reading the pains.” STEVEN DUNN

“Animated with the moxie and wit of Acker and Tillman, Caren Beilin is one of the most bizarre and fearless writers of her generation. Revenge of the Scapegoat is a surreal take on the tendency people have to damage those we claim to love and the way parental cruelty renders the world unrecognizable.” CATHERINE LACEY

“I have been desperate for a book so hotly pink-gold with righteous emasculation, with the comeuppance of the beat poets, a book of such loudly jointed parts. Caren Beilin has written the scapegoat’s anti-anthem.” JOANNA RUOCCO

“Most impressive, perhaps, is the darkly comic strain that persists throughout the novel; though the narrative involves childhood trauma, domestic abuse, addiction, medical exploitation, and the Holocaust, Iris’ wholly unique voice makes for a very funny work. This wide-ranging, idea-driven novel leaves the reader with much to think about, deftly provoking questions about the nature and ethics of trauma and contemporary art.” KIRKUS

“The author lands on an infectious and perfect blend of cultural criticism, wry writing advice (‘Don’t bother writing a character since people change’), and magnificently weird storytelling. Beilin’s account of reemergence manages to be both hilarious and deeply moving.” PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY (starred review)

w/ Maddie Crum for THE CREATIVE INDEPENDENT (interview)

“I was instantly won over by Beilin’s writing—so funny and serious and playful. Her books have the natural authority of those artworks that are strictly, rigorously themselves.” SHEILA HETI, THE PARIS REVIEW (interview)

“Caren Beilin’s prose trusts us to invest in the logic, sound, and feeling at hand. I come for the sentences, and I stay for the politics.” LEORA FRIDMAN, BOOKFORUM (interview)

“It is up to the reader, ultimately, to discover Beilin’s intuitive leaps. Doing so is like discovering the hidden underground network of fungal threads that produce the spotted red cap of a particularly gorgeous fly amanita mushroom on a rainy July afternoon.” Melissa Reddish, NECESSARY FICTION (review)

“This book is a wacky delight.” LAUREN GROFF, AT THE MOVIES (itself)

w/ David Naimon for the BETWEEN THE COVERS podcast

w/ Brad Listi for the OTHERPPL podcast

“I zoomed through the novel, not only to discover what happens next, but more, for the thrill of living inside Iris’ mind.” ELISABETH HALL, FULL STOP (review)

“There’s a sense of gleeful rampage.” RHIAN SASSEEN, THE PARIS REVIEW (The Review’s Review)

“A surprise in plot, image, and phrase on every page.” JOSH COOK, THE BOSTON GLOBE (“Pick of the Week”)

“This hallucinatory, macabre, and surprisingly jubilant book about breaking free from cycles of family trauma had me laughing in the laundromat and weeping in the back of the bus. I'm certain Beilin's revenge will feel like a gift to many, but especially to the truth-tellers, the survivors, the exilic by nature; truly to anyone who has learned, at great risk, how to stay alive in spite/despite. Viva the scapegoats.” ALEXA W. POWELL’S (staff pick)

“It’s not often I read a work and want to know, simply, how. How did the writer write this?” PATRICK COTTRELL, LA REVIEW OF BOOKS (interview)

5 BOOKS I READ RECENTLY AND LOVED, DENNIS COOPER BLOG

“I’ve shared a taste of Beilin’s prose at length, and while I think it’s representative of the novel’s style, it can’t replace the feeling of how her sentences flow and build and ebb and swell. Initially, some of the verbal tics in Scapegoat irritated me, but it was the kind of irritation that makes you want to keep reading. And, a few pages after the lovely strange passage I’ve quoted above, our hungry hungry hero declares, ‘I needed some beef like you wouldn’t beleef.’ I laughed out loud and that initial irritation resolved into something like love. Highly recommended.” EDWIN TURNER, BIBLIOKEPT (review)

“Beilin’s newest is some of the best we’ve come to expect from her; a raw heart; delightful irreverence toward whatever ‘literature’ is; and sentences that are impossible to see coming, every time. Following the re-receipt of old letters from a toxic father, Beilin’s protagonist goes on a journey of definition, conversation, and, possibly, redemption, with a stop along the way including cows that step on human hearts.” KYLE FRANCIS WILLIAMS (staff pick at McNally Jackson, downtown Brooklyn).

Mine for yours: My favorite fiction, poetry, non-fiction, film, art, and internet of 2022 so far, denniscooperblog.com

“Reading Revenge of the Scapegoat, you’ll find yourself laughing one of those laughs that stops abruptly when you suddenly grasp that we have internalized our own oppression.” PRISCILLA POSADA, LA REVIEW OF BOOKS (review)

“Beilin has held the prism of her imagination up to reality, and Revenge of the Scapegoat has come out. The book contains a world that feels whole and internally consistent, its surface lined with mirrors in which we are forced to examine ourselves. Fans of Sheila Heti and Sabrina Orah Mark will enjoy the way Beilin explores her conceptual priorities in this book through surreal imagery and philosophical ramblings. Repeated images speckle the pages like colors in a palette, and sometimes urgency gathers inside an image and comes alive.” FANI AVRAMOPOULO, HEAVY FEATHER REVIEW (review)

“This book is wild, and less than 200 pages….It's a delightfully bonkers story, perfect for fans of Kathy Acker, Guadalupe Nettel, Sarah Rose Etter, Pola Oloixarac, or even Ottessa Moshfegh.” ALISON, SEVEN STORIES PRESS STAFF PICKS, JULY 2022

“Some of the sentences feel truly deranged—in an exciting way, they’ve broken free!—and there’s a wholehearted embrace of the absurd, but for all its freewheeling style and humour, it’s never frivolous, saying interesting things about oppression and the quest, however quixotic, for justice and recognition.” MARISA GRIZENKO, PLAIN PLEASURES (recommendation + awesome Revenge art)

“her new book is knocking the wind out of me. you’ve got to get this one. an electric mind.” SARAH ROSE ETTER, FROM A GLASSY STONE (itself)

“It feels like stumbling on a recording of someone else's absurd therapy session, which might be real or an art project or both—which is now stuck in your broken Subaru’s tape deck—which you won’t be able to stop listening to, even if you want to.” Georgie Fehringer, CLEVELAND REVIEW OF BOOKS (review)

“How I got through reading this without it leaving permanent damage to my brain is beyond me.” GOODREADS (my favorite one star review)

“an incredible little book about the various ways we confront family trauma. in combining the everday conviviality of Cookie Mueller with the more lucid surrealities of William S Burroughs, Caren Beilin rises above mere affectation and makes the vulgarities and absurdities an integral part of the narrative.” GOODREADS (my favorite five star review)

“(Dorothy, A Publishing Project) Revenge of the Scapegoat is an absurdist novel exploring different elements of trauma told from the point of view of an art professor with chronic illness and a complicated family history. Though funny at times, Beilin’s romp through a cultured wasteland has a lot of depth and ache to convey. A truly unique and compelling depiction of the disorienting nature of pain.” Amanda Rivera, BOOKSHOP.ORG’S EDITOR’S PICKS NEWSLETTER

“Not only is this novel undoubtedly accomplished, Revenge of the Scapegoat had me laughing myself feral.” Grace Ezra, THE COMMON

“Revenge of the Scapegoat transports us to a surreal, blunt world where the only recurring male characters are Iris’ two shit-covered feet.” Riley Kerr, the paper

“It’s both a surreal cannabis novel and a family estrangement novel that is always aligned with the scapegoat. You’re either with us or against us! Caren is absolutely with.” Chantal V. Johnson, THE MILLIONS

MINE FOR YOURS: MY FAVORITE FICTION, NON-FICTION, FILM, ART, and INTERNET of 2022, DENNISCOOPERBLOG

“If there is a primary argument in this book, it is that the value of suffering might be salvaged through art. Beilin has a power for putting things together and then for complicating their placements. There is mundane trauma and unfathomably horrific trauma, and trauma that begets more trauma, and these multiplicities can lay beside one another. Much of the book is extended discussion: she tells us what she is going to do in the book, and then she does it; she tells us what shouldn’t be done, and she does that too.” Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo, ANNULET

“One possible defense is to transform language itself.” Margot Harrison, SEVEN DAYS