Jeremy Leslie is the founder and Creative Director of magCulture studio and shop, which is known for celebrating magazines and bringing the mag-making community together. He regularly hosts events and groups at the store, and also runs both a podcast and magazine conference called ModMag.
Which three books would you recommend?
Slaughterhouse-FiveKurt Vonnegut
I'd recommend this to everyone; a mix of tragic autobiography and ridiculous scifi fantasy, Vonnegut shares his personal experience of the bombing of Dresden (a relatively little-known event during WW2, when the British carpet bombed the German city using more explosive power than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima). He uses the book to both exorcise what he saw and explain how he used humour and faith in our shared humanity to overcome the horror. Lessons for all on how to cope with the extreme while keeping your cool. I re-read it every couple of years or so.
The Third MindWilliam S. Burroughs and Brion Gysi
Any twenty something art student should get something from this. That's when I read it. It describes the two US members of the sixties art squad and their experiments in mind control and using chance to create. Burroughs and Gysin visited London and exhibited their work and some of the equipment – the dream machine – they used for their experiments. Hearing Burroughs read from his latest book at the time (Cities of the Red Night) and his earlier classics (Naked Lunch) is a definite fond memory. The cut-up experiments in the book, cutting up sentences and randomly building new ones from the individual words, was something taken up by loads of artists including David Bowie. That was a highlight of the book; there was plenty of nonsense too. But it reminds me of being student and being free to believe in nonsense.
10:04Ben Lerner
This is Lerner's second book. It's a pair with his first, Leaving the Atocha Station. Both are brilliant, complex combinations of real life (Lerner's) and fiction. They jump about in space and time, and feel like you have a direct line into the main character's mind – basically Lerner's mind. You hear him thinking aloud, and describing everything from his perspective in often quite selfish ways. He's unafraid to be pretentious and unlikeable, which is refreshing.
I regularly re-read these too, they're like old friends.