THE NOVEL ‘LOVE BEFORE COVID’

by Greg Scorzo –

KEY SELLING POINTS

The reader is taken on a journey through the mind of Joe Pastorius; jazz fan, poet, and victim of horrendous abuse at the hands of his mother.

A novelised experimental and extreme collection of real-time dialogues, traversing a complex moral maze of how love is being impacted by gender politics in these polarised political times.

Dialogues entail an exploration of clashing perspectives and opinions, that cause reflection.

Love Before Covid explores themes not limited to: mental health, body shaming, narcissim, parental responsibilities, domestic violence, deviousness, manipulation, sexual freedom, sexual abuse, gender identity, and ultimately conditional and unconditional love.

PLOT

English teacher and writer Joe Pastorious is a jazz fan, Leicester based poet, and a victim of horrendous sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of his mother. In a journey through real-timedialogues that emerge from Joe’s corrupted memories and dystopian dreams, follow this trip throughJoe’s unconscious mind to learn more about Joe – and perhaps more about our world – than youcould ever imagine.

You are left to your own devices to decide if you think there are any heroes or villains in this book. Whatever you decide, your moral boundaries will be pushed to the limit.

However, there is always hope. For Joe Pastorious, that comes in the form of a psychopath named Janet Waverley.

Love Before Covid is both a highly melodramatic, and deeply mysterious novel – a book drenched in abuse, heartbreak, hope, and disorientation. Exploring the nature of love and drawing focus to thedark side of romance, procreation and sex, it deals unsparingly with unpredictable behaviour, abuse, depravity and forgiveness. To find out what healthy love could be, this book explores what it shouldn’tbe.

AUTHOR

Since gaining his PhD in Philosophy, Greg Scorzo has aimed to find creative and original ways to take philosophical thinking outside of academia. By using modern accessible philosophical dialogue inpublic talks, podcasts and his novel Love Before Covid, Greg explores clashing perspectives and opinions that cause reflection. Based in Leicester, he was a founding member of Culture on the Offensive and runs the podcast The ‘Art of Thinking’ .

Please email admin@cultureontheoffensive.com with your name and address if you would like to get a complimentary review copy.

The BOOK

This book comprises a set of dialogues in the form of real-time conversations, and it is written by a philosopher. This is important because in a sense this is a contemporary re-visiting of the dialogue form of philosophical fiction.

Love Before Covid is the story of writer and English teacher Joe Pastorious. Joe is a jazz fan, a Leicester based poet, and a victim of horrendous sexual and emotional abuse at the hands of his mother. The book takes you on a trip through Joe’s mind; a journey through real-time dialogues that emerge from his corrupted memories and dystopian dreams. The contents of Joe’s unconscious tell us more about Joe than he could ever know, and perhaps more about our world than you could ever imagine.

In Love Before Covid, you will meet an altruist who can’t stand up for himself, a gregarious bartender who will do anything to get pregnant, a traumatised art historian who hates children, a successful Mexican writer who dislikes her own friends, a charming public intellectual who once violently disfigured her boyfriend, a tall beautiful dancer who hates fat people and a teenage genius who fantasises about his porn star mother.

You will also encounter passionate feminists, violent alcoholics, religious fanatics, sadistic parents, kind misanthropes, woke bisexuals, a woman who is pressured into cutting off her penis, female kick boxers, violent vegans and a successful therapist who has a habit of ruining people’s lives. The dialogues all co-exist within parallel realities, dreams within dreams, and very passionate and sometimes violent arguments.

You are left to your own devices to decide if you think there are any heroes or villains in this book. Whatever you decide, your moral boundaries will be pushed to the limit. And yes, before you ask, some of the characters in this book eventually catch Covid 19.

However there is always hope. For Joe Pastorious, that comes in the form of a psychopath named Janet Waverley.

” Divided into five parts, and mainly consisting of dialogues between character pairs, the book is a hefty tome which reads surprisingly quickly. The dialogues, somewhat script-like, make it completely accessible to anyone. It’s a work of fiction but some aspects of the dialogues scream with bitter realism …This is a book which intrigues, revolts, repulses, stimulates, in parts a stream of consciousness, in others, a metaphysical treatise on contemporary discourse in our media, universities and homes. To read this book is to experience being a silent ghost, haunting bedrooms, living rooms and coffee shops, watching and listening to the most intimate details of conversations spoken by others …This is a challenging book, one not easy to forget. Dazzling in its originality and depth, it’s like nothing you have ever read before or will read again. Unless it is written by Greg Scorzo.”

– KAREN HARRADINE – Author/ Political commentator

Greg Scorzo should come with a warning. This diabolical thinker has produced something dangerous, unsettling and unpleasant. Renewing a literary approach to philosophy befitting the likes of Plato, Rousseau, Sartre, Murdoch or Badiou, Scorzo rattles our prejudices and shatters our assumptions. In this respect, Scorzo is a ‘true’ philosopher.”

 BRADLEY TUCK Founder, Editor, facilitator Exploding Appendix www.explodingappendix.com

“Greg is one of the most interesting, original and unorthodox thinkers today.”

DR NIKOS SOTIRAKOPOULOS  Sociologist and Author

AVAILABLE FROM TROUBADOR PUBLISHING 

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