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A GRAVEYARD OF FIRST CHAPTERS
A dazzling literary fiction novel about second chances, buried stories, and the strange power of starting over.

Once a bestselling author with ten novels under his belt, Jasper Delgado has watched his life crumble piece by piece. He's lost his girlfriend, his house, his life savings to a disastrous day-trading venture, and worst of all—his confidence as a writer. All he has left is a beat-up laptop filled with what he calls his "graveyard of first chapters": brilliant beginnings to novels he could never finish. This experimental novel explores the tortured world of writers and writing, where creativity meets crisis and inspiration battles despair.

Then a mysterious letter arrives from Peru—typed on a broken Corona typewriter.

A half-sister he never knew existed claims he's inherited a crumbling hacienda near the ancient city of Cusco. The letter is eccentric, misspelled, and possibly a scam. But with nothing left to lose and nowhere else to turn, Jasper embarks on an improbable Peru adventure that will force him to confront his past—and the stories he abandoned.

What begins as a desperate escape becomes a journey of magical transformation.

As Jasper travels from American car washes to Peruvian highlands, from ayahuasca ceremonies to encounters with mysterious pottery thieves, fiction begins to bleed into reality. His abandoned stories start making uncanny sense. Memory blurs with myth. The line between imagination and truth dissolves entirely. This metafiction explores what happens when life imitates art, when the stories we tell ourselves become the stories that save us.

Accompanied by his rekindled love Vanessa, his unlikely friend Butch, and the enigmatic Inés—who may or may not be his sister—Jasper discovers that his graveyard of creative failures might not be a death sentence after all. What if these fragments—of stories, of life, of love, of identity—can be pieced together into something magnificent and whole?

By turns comic, philosophical, and heartbreakingly self-aware, this magical realism masterpiece walks the blurred lines between fiction and existence. It's an experimental novel about unfinished stories, written on the page and in the heart—and the absurd, glorious, completed puzzle that can be made of all those fragments. A story about second chances that reminds us it's never too late to rewrite your life.

Praise for Johnny Payne:
"A wild whirlwind, pure fun and a turbine of energy and shrapnel. You won't be able to put this novel down."
— Anthony Seidman, author of That Beast in the Mirror

"Insanely funny, yet confronts the unavoidable disturbance at the core of human experience. This is a book that everyone should read."
— Stephen-Paul Martin, author of TwentyTwenty and The Ace of Lightning

"In the tradition of the late, great Gilbert Sorrentino, Johnny Payne’s latest “novel”, A Graveyard of First Chapters, is a tour de force of narrative invention, an exposition of writing’s potential when it is freed from the laborious conventions of the contemporary novel. A Graveyard of First Chapters is a true delight."
— Michael Boughn, author of Cosmographia—A Post-Lucretian Faux Micro-Epic

Johnny Payne is the author of many novels, including Confessions of a Gentleman Killer and The Hard Side of the River. His poetry collections include Ostraca and Midnight Sutra. His book of short stories, Fish Head, is forthcoming from Bright House. His novel Confessions of a Gentleman Killer won the 2021 Benjamin Franklin Award Gold Medal for Fiction: Horror. He is also a playwright and essayist for Merion West Magazine, and Director of the Creative Writing MFA Program at Mount Saint Mary's University in Los Angeles. Fluent in Spanish and Quechua, he has lived extensively in both Peru and the American Southwest, bringing authentic cultural perspective to his exploration of cross-cultural themes and storytelling traditions.