One Hour of Television

One Hour of Television is a bleeding, screaming, literary freak-beast adventure novel created by new Canadian voice-sensation Kristina Born. Told in poetic-micro-burst segments, Born transcribes a filthy world of wicked science, consumerism, bomb building, and Texas hold em. From a boiled pot of Gary Lutz, Andy Kaufman, and pure human fear, One Hour of Television is a story of mad consumption that will, through its paper, consume you.

In a recent interview with The Faster Times, Kristina Born the author has some interesting things to say about how the book was created, and what sort of style it is written in.

I wrote the majority of OHT during the summer after my second year of university. I came home and worked a 10-hour graveyard shift at a local gas station. I was alone from 8pm-6am and since no one came in after about 11 or so, I had very little actual work to do. I wanted to give myself a writing project for the summer, so I decided that I would write a small story based on every element in the periodic table. I looked up each element on Wikipedia and took down a few facts that jumped at me, and wrote them in no particular order. After 11 at the gas station, the rule was that I had to write three sections, and then I was allowed to read Infinite Jest until around 3, when I mopped and started making coffee for the truckers. After about three weeks, some themes started to emerge and I realized it was a book.

To me, it’s a novel. I really hate the terms “novella” and “novelette” because they don’t mean anything. It’s a short novel, that’s all. I’m not a poet and I would never describe my writing as prose poetry - which also doesn’t mean anything - and if I read something like Anne Carson’s DECREATION, which is a lot of different things, it seems pointless to me to try to classify it as plays or essays or poetry. It’s a book and it’s good.