LOVE BEFORE COVID by GREG SCORZO – FREE BOOK GIVEAWAY for REVIEWS.

By Greg Scorzo –

We are giving away some 1st Edition self-published copies of LOVE BEFORE COVID, to anyone who would like to read it, and write a short review, on Goodreads or other book platforms. We are happy to announce that the second edition will be published by Troubador’s Matador publishing arm in August 2023.

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

The AUDIO PLAY

LOVE BEFORE COVID is comprised of 3 chapters of the Book. It is portraying elaborate, unfolding situations within 2 different romantic relationships. Our protagonist Joe experiences these situations with partners Janet and Lorraine. Focussing on the dark and disturbing pain that love can evoke, it provokes the listener at every twist and turn. The audio play confronts what would be seen as love’s shadow side. We discover what love should be by confronting what it shouldn’t be.

Warning – This is dark and disturbing because love can be dark and disturbing.

LOVE BEFORE COVID – written, devised, directed and scored by author, philosopher Greg Scorzo. Starring Daniel Ashman and Sarah Dalzell and narrated by Chris Conway. Visual design by Isaac Caplan Wilson and produced by Lizzie Soden.