Fragile July (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781917617697)

Fragile July by Oscar Nearly is a prose-poem of obsessive reconstruction, circling a single childhood summer in which the ordinary textures of suburbia, garden games, disposable-camera snapshots, pop songs, and family rituals begin to feel charged with threat. Built from repetition, incremental shifts, and documentary attention to objects and photographs, the text tests how memory hardens into narrative, how evidence both clarifies and corrupts, and how dread can arrive retrospectively as a structure imposed on the past. Its atmosphere is uncanny rather than overtly surreal, with domestic scenes tightening around pits, locked spaces, missing rooms, and half-seen figures at windows, while the book's origin in performance and installation gives its visual material a parallel weight, making image and recollection contend for authority.