Abandon Every Hope: Essays for the Dead

Abandon Every Hope mournfully investigates the literatures of the slaughterhouse and a world motivated by profitable death, ultimately asking: where does this horror begin and how can it end?

Can anyone smell the suffering of souls? Of sadness, of hell on earth? Hell, I imagine, has a smell that bloats into infinity. It has a nasty sting of corpses. What was it Dante wrote?

Abandon Every Hope is a lament, an elegy, a deranged encyclopedia, and a diary of anxiety. How can anyone document the vastness of violence against animals in a bloated industrial age?

Across a series of essays, Hayley Singer investigates the literatures of the slaughterhouse to map the contours of a world cut to pieces by organised and profitable death. A compelling debut in poetic prose, Singer asks how we may write the life of the dead; the smell of an egg factory; of multispecies PTSD; of planetary harm and self-harm—of the horror we make on earth. Where does the slaughterhouse begin and how can it end?

Singer writes with a magnificent intensity, moving between different registers in order to bear witness to the pain and suffering of the slaughterhouse. — Stephanie King, Readings

Abandon Every Hope takes the form of a thanatography—an attempt to write death—which Hayley Singer describes as having a "nearness to biography." — Fiona Wright, The Saturday Paper

A quietly ambitious book about suffering. — Ben Brooker, Australian Book Review

Singer's skill lies in controlling the level of discomfort in the essays to the point where you feel it as a reader but don't put the book down for a breath of fresh air or a long stare out the window, reflecting on your own part in all this. — Jasper Linde, The Canberra Times

Experimental and jostling in its use of poetic, lyric, academic and reflective writing styles, this book grapples with the industrial meat complex. — Stella Prize Judges comments