Tobias Carroll

Retro 4 is the latest collection of the best, the funniest, the strangest, and the most affecting stories from the award winning literary magazine, Joyland.

A minute-by-minute analysis of Ben Wheatley's film, Kill List (2011). 2011’s Kill List, directed by Ben Wheatley and written by Wheatley and Amy Jump, provides an almost alchemical space by which audiences can watch as one genre transforms into another - from crime drama to paranoid thriller to terrifying folk horror - before our eyes. Narrative misdirection abounds in this film, but Wheatley and Jump are after something more than simple narrative cleverness. This film encompasses supernatural conspiracies and shocking acts of violence, but at its heart it’s a story of a man trying to be a good husband and father — and failing comprehensively at both tasks. It’s also a story of the larger forces that can govern most people’s lives, whether the economic impact of a recession or the strategic deployment of rituals and magic. Taking readers through the events of Kill List minute by minute, this book explores the dense plotting and overlapping threads of this film, the thematic anxieties that plague its characters, and the allusions to heroes and conflicts that bolster its storytelling. Kill List is both a visceral trip into one man’s waking nightmare and a haunting exploration of moral ruin. This book is a rigorous guide to the cinematic landmarks found along the way.

Finalist for the Big Other Book Award for Nonfiction 2020Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. In an election year, political signs can be impossible to avoid. They’re in front yards, on bumper stickers, and in some places you might never have expected. Tobias Carroll chronicles the permutations and secret histories of political signs, venturing into the story of how they came to be and illuminating how the signs around us shape us in ways we often fail to appreciate. In an era of political polarization and heated debate, what can be learned from studying how our personal space becomes the setting for both? Understanding political signs can help us understand our current political moment, and how we might transcend it. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Reel follows two lives that collide at a Seattle punk show, and the strange consequences that arise. Timon serves as the hyperobservant western outpost of his family's business, verifying artifacts and losing himself in deafening music and isolation. Marianne fears stagnation, and has begun to crave the rootless travel of her youth. After a tense meeting, each proceeds through a series of surreal encounters that deconstruct the lives that they've created, forcing each one into a reckoning with the world around them.