Author: Hector Mackenzie
Genre: Literary Fiction
Former high school rugby player turned model, he’s on the come down from a decade-long carrousel of validation, praise, admiration and jealousy from men and women alike. In other words, he’s become equally fluent in the codes of toxic masculinity and femininity, from fistfights and emotional avoidance to ageism and disordered eating. Returning to his hometown in New Zealand, he finds himself a stranger at home, struggling to connect with his parents while confronting and succumbing to old habits that die hard. At core, the long cloud is about change. How we embrace and champion it for ourselves but slide into resentment or fear of it anywhere else.
The book is written in lower caps and has no commas. Its narrator is unreliable. It embodies the internal and external anxieties of a generation chronically online. It has short chapters, like tweets or texts, making it addictive and hypnotic. It’s also practical – adapted to our crowded modern lives, overstimulated minds and short attention spans. Readers will appreciate its choose-your-adventure quality, accommodating a medley of reading styles: sporadic or compulsive, linear or scattered.
Hector MacKenzie’s long cloud is a timely, timeless book about leaving and returning, failure and success, ambivalence and disappearance, things and people left behind. It’s funny, snarky, touching and profound.
- Chris Kraus, author of cult novel I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker
Author: Hector Mackenzie
Genre: Literary Fiction
Former high school rugby player turned model, he’s on the come down from a decade-long carrousel of validation, praise, admiration and jealousy from men and women alike. In other words, he’s become equally fluent in the codes of toxic masculinity and femininity, from fistfights and emotional avoidance to ageism and disordered eating. Returning to his hometown in New Zealand, he finds himself a stranger at home, struggling to connect with his parents while confronting and succumbing to old habits that die hard. At core, the long cloud is about change. How we embrace and champion it for ourselves but slide into resentment or fear of it anywhere else.
The book is written in lower caps and has no commas. Its narrator is unreliable. It embodies the internal and external anxieties of a generation chronically online. It has short chapters, like tweets or texts, making it addictive and hypnotic. It’s also practical – adapted to our crowded modern lives, overstimulated minds and short attention spans. Readers will appreciate its choose-your-adventure quality, accommodating a medley of reading styles: sporadic or compulsive, linear or scattered.
Hector MacKenzie’s long cloud is a timely, timeless book about leaving and returning, failure and success, ambivalence and disappearance, things and people left behind. It’s funny, snarky, touching and profound.
- Chris Kraus, author of cult novel I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker
Scribe
Winter 2026
