UK publication for novel about a debauched, divorced road comedian | Sam Tallent’s Running The Light out in May

UK publication for novel about a debauched, divorced road comedian

Sam Tallent’s Running The Light out in May

A novel inspired by American stand-up Sam Tallent’s life as a road comic is to get a UK release.

Running The Light revolves around Billy Ray Schafer, a debauched, divorced comedian ‘who has forgotten how to laugh’. Over seven days across the American South West, he ‘travels from hell gig to hell gig in search of a reason to keep living’.

It was first published in the US in 2020 and it will now be released in the UK on May 15 by White Rabbit, who describe the title as a ‘bleak and violent glimpse into the psyche of a thoroughly ruined man’.

The blurb from publishers adds: 'Ex-inmate, ex-husband, ex-father – comedian is the only title Schafer has left. Trapped in the wreckage of his wasted career, Billy Ray knows the answer to the question: What happens when opportunity doesn't come – or worse – it comes and goes?’

Tallent has also announced a short UK tour to tie in with the publication, playing Glasgow’s Oran Mor on May 14, Bush Hall in London on the 16th and the Frog and Bucket Manchester on the 18th. 

As well as spending more than a decade performing almost every weekend in comedy clubs around the world, Tallent is the co-host of the Chubby Behemoth podcast with Nathan Lund.. He has also made  two comedy specials: Waiting For Death To Claim Us  on Amazon Prime and The Toad’s Morale on YouTube.

Fellow comic Doug Stanhope has written the foreword to the new edition of the novel, which he describes as an 'instant classic’. Marc Maron called it ‘a beautiful rendering of a dark reality’.

      

Published: 24 Jan 2025

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