Description
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Stendhal experienced a “sort of ecstasy” when he first entered the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence. In the first part, Josh Boardman details his own experience of Stendhal Syndrome at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli in 2014. Originally released as a limited run in 2024, this Non Canonical American Literature Edition contains a new “about the series” essay, as well as a new design.
About the Series
Colossal is a series of essays drawn from travel notes, extempore impressions, and loose scraps of paper that documents past selves in the shadow of colossal art objects. In the midst of profound experience, the author takes notes: sitting down at a cafe, a cerveceria, a lean-to at the trail checkpoint, and narrates the events that have occurred since starting out. Details, snippets of conversation, and feelings are written down: why a bust of Julius Caesar was so frightening, why the trees flickered as if under strobe lights outside the hospital room. Often the notes are revealing or embarrassing. Often the author is unwashed and exhausted, pushing a few drinks down his gullet just to sleep.
The work of the Colossal series is to leave the self alone. The tendency to revise is resisted; the notes captured in scene make up the language of the nonfictional construction—because the work is no longer to document the surroundings, but the self. The author asks: how could the person who wrote in Italy be the same who wrote in Mexico? The persons are totally distinct, yet these others all make up one self, which is to say that the one self is no one. The only solution for suffering is to become a stranger to your self.
About the Author
Josh Boardman is from Michigan. He is the author of Colossal (ongoing), Plantain (West Vine Press, 2018), and the Latin translation project We, Romans (2015). His work was selected as a finalist in the 2024 Fugue Prose Prize, shortlisted in the 2025 Leopold Bloom Prize for Innovative Narration, and his stories have appeared in journals such as Zona Motel, New York Tyrant, and Dandruff Magazine. In 2025, he was selected as research resident at the New York Public Library’s Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities for focused work on his novel. He lives in Brooklyn, New York with his family.
He is the founder, owner, and operator of Hewes House, a writing community with the aim of fostering a new generation of literary voices.
