Black Bag
An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychology experiment. What could possibly go wrong?
ISBN
9781638933380
Language
English
Page count
352
Edition
Hardcover
Sale date
March 17, 2026
Dimensions
6 x 9
About the Book
In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized leather bag, sitting silently at the back of the lecture hall, over a series of Fall lectures?
The role, eagerly accepted by our narrator, soon yields unexpected consequences, from a professor of post-humanism developing a research question of her own—can you fall in love with someone secreted away inside a black bag?—to the actor’s childhood friend forming an unnerving vision for monetizing this bizarre new situation . . .
A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity, and an off-kilter romance, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.
Reviews
“Kennard’s Black Bag gives us a wryly subversive glimpse into the inner life of an actor who barely perceives how truly lost he is. It’s clever, moving, biting, rich with integrity, and wildly funny.”
“What’s most extraordinary about Black Bag isn’t just its wry discursions to the psychology classroom, the sex dungeon, or the Swedish sawmill of the mind—though these are rendered with such phosphorescent wit that I could’ve read a book’s worth of each. In Black Bag, we’re treated to an uncommonly funny and deeply necessary snapshot of masculinity no more objectionable nor perfect than a black leather bag. Whoever thinks men aren’t writing fiction clearly needs to read Luke Kennard.”
“Black Bag is a stylish, fun, and surprisingly incisive examination of masculinity, modernity, and attempting to make a living as a creative. It’s also a weird little book about and, presumably for, sickos. Reading it hits like a concussion that makes you stranger but more compassionate. Easily the sharpest, funniest thing I’ve read all year.”
“How much can you fit in a large leather satchel? Luke Kennard suggests, when said bag is zipped up around the body of an out-of-work actor trying to find his way, the answer is near infinite: humor, dear friendship, frustrated desire, a talking dog, a wad of cash, hallucinogens, ambition, AI, humility, and no shortage of heart. Black Bag carried me along with a tremendously deft hand: it had me laughing, unnerved, and hopeful as it galloped through a true and strange world. This book left me reckoning with what to make of the society outside my proverbial eye slits, and what, with some effort, we might make of it still.”
“Equal parts charming and unhinged, Black Bag is the perfect novel for anyone who has ever felt like “someone is constantly slapping me in the stomach with an old brown shoe.” This is one of hundreds (thousands?) of quotable lines from an immensely talented writer to watch. Luke Kennard, I will follow you anywhere.”