All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy publishes the manuscript of the fictional character Jack Torrance from The Shining. Referencing Stephen King’s novel but mostly Stanley Kubrick’s film adaption, Buehler copies the pages seen in the movie when Torrance’s wife Wendy first encounters her husband’s manuscript pages. Discovering that he has been writing the same sentence over and over for hundreds of pages in different graphical constellations while pretending to be working on his novel, the manuscript functions as a testimony of his madness. Buehler’s published version of the manuscript adds several new word constellations, turning it into a collection of concrete typewriter poetry “getting progressively crazier” (blurb on Blurb).

By constructing an editorship through Phil Buehler and attributing authorship to the fictional novel character, All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy becomes a metafictional play that not only transgresses the line between fiction and reality but also imagines a survival of the manuscript after the untimely death of its author at the Overlook Hotel, as described in the film. The back cover shows an ironic review of the novel Jack Torrance writes in The Shining, published by Matthew Belinkie on the popular culture blog Overthinking.it in 2008.

Available with three different covers and in three different qualities (paperback, hardcover, dust jacket).