Origami

Level End

A video game walkthrough written as a sequence of lyric essays. The reader is treated as a player, guided through boss battles that turn out to be uncannily familiar.

a shelf of chapbooks:short, folded, two-colour,gone within a year.
The chapbook is a physical tradition as much as a literary one: short, cheaply printed, and made to be handed around.
Level End: the record
Field Value
Form Lyric essay
Author Brian Oliu
Published 2012
Extent 32 pages
Status out of print

What the book does

A walkthrough is second person, imperative and obsessively procedural. Level End keeps that machinery and swaps out what is being described, so a book about loss never once announces itself as one. It is a frequent example in discussions of the lyric essay and of the second person.

In Level End, Brian Oliu treats you as a player rather than a reader.

Where this book lives now

Origami Zoo Press closed in 2015 and this edition is out of print. Much of the catalogue moved to Bull City Press. We are an independent archive of the address, not the publisher, and we do not sell this book. To read it, look for the Bull City Press catalogue or a library copy.

More on the form this book belongs to: what a chapbook is. Back to the shelf.