Pushcart Prize-winning author Chris Campanioni tells a story about the silences of generational trauma and the tenuous conditions in which stories get passed down in migration, a surface flimsy enough to allow the traffic between novel, notebook, reportage, and myth.

While collecting the scattered stories of his parents’ entangled passages to the United States, the narrator begins to record the material onto videocassettes through a series of cutting and grafting, splicing footage of his present dislocation and overlaying on the audio track the polyphonic voices of his inherited exiles.

VHS reminds us, in its narrative’s insistence on mediation, that the slippage between speaker and listener, experience and memory, is also a fault line that can reveal our own prior movements.

PRAISE FOR VHS 

"Campanioni's confident, everything-everywhere-all-at-once consciousness refuses to fully take shape or offer clear explanations. Their aesthetics is to ride on desire, memory, and geography, always staying ahead of themselves. This kind of experiment feels antithetical to the more structured discursive forms I’m used to, yet the montage and polyvocality of VHS's narrative both dazzles and inspires me to try something similar. Perhaps a good way to approach a draft would be to spill out memories and future plans, let associations run to their most eerie edges, and then puzzle together the strongest moments into something that echoes Campanioni’s form and tone."

—Hantian Zhang, The Adroit Journal

“A dazzling novel that takes the now-staid modes of much autofiction and turns them inside out. VHS is incantatory, wholly original and alive. A bravura performance with a voyeuristic glee.”

—Ernesto Mestre-Reed, author of Sacrificio

“A brilliant lyrical and philosophical adventure. A novel as a screen capture, a guidebook, a reimagination, a reenactment … all those lightning connections of a brain running hot. The mix of tenderness and depth. VHS gives me everything I want.”

—Nate Lippens, author of My Dead Book and Ripcord

"Chris Campanioni has created yet another sexy and stunning book. VHS defies categorization. It revels in its rebellion. It is both nostalgic and visionary, an expertly crafted balance between the surreal and achingly familiar dimensions of memory. As raw and unapologetic as Reinaldo Arenas, Campanioni is a singular talent; a director, cinematographer, poet and superb storyteller rolled into one. VHS is pop. It’s retro. And it has all the makings of a cult classic."

—John Manuel Arias, author of Where There Was Fire

PRAISE FOR CHRIS CAMPANIONI

“Campanioni shows himself to be a major intellectual force—an analyst and critic of the human condition in the midst of technological forces—their causes and consequences, costs and benefits.” 

—Clara B. Jones, Fence 

“Self-analysis is part of every memoir, but in Campanioni’s case it acquires an added interest, given the apparent contrast between his roles as writer and model. The result is fascinating.” 

—Gabriel García Ochoa, Harvard Review

“In poetry and fiction, in critical essays and new-media hybrid pieces, in sentences alternately lavish and trim, he breaks the sound barrier. Like José Lezama Lima, Campanioni finds no syntactic or figurative posture too baroque to try on for size. Migratory poetics is among his current subjects; his protean energies—his willingness to go everywhere with a thought, and to spin an association out to its most eerie and electrified edge—elevate him to a rare rank of writer. Campanioni is the traveler who, like Hervé Guibert, rides language without ever stopping to worry that language might not cooperate.” 

—Wayne Koestenbaum, BOMB

Chris Campanioni was born in Manhattan and grew up in a very nineties New Jersey. He is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the International Latino Book Award, and the Academy of American Poets College Prize. His essays, poetry, and fiction have been translated into Spanish and Portuguese and have found a home in several venues, including Latin American Literature Today and Best American Essays. His work on regimes of surveillance, queer migration, and the auto-archival practices of people moving across transnational spaces has been awarded the Calder Prize for interdisciplinary work and a Mellon Foundation fellowship. Chris’s multimedia art has been exhibited at the New York Academy of Art and the film adaptation of his poem “This body’s long & I’m still loading” was in the official selection at the Canadian International Film Festival.

OFFICIAL RELEASE 3.11.2025 

ISBN: 9781960988386