How Not to Kill Yourself: A Survival Guide for Imaginative Pessimists
About this audiobook
A highly imaginative and relatable guide for anyone who needs the reassurance that suicide is never worth it.
Are you inclined to escape the crumminess of everyday life into fantasy worlds? Are you smart and imaginative in a way that isn’t really suited to your surroundings? Are you definitely misunderstood, likely angry, and almost certainly depressed? Set Sytes, hailing from the UK, would prefer you stay alive and sort things out rather than the alternative, thanks. He figures there are better opportunities for you out there and lays it all out in a way that’s compelling, funny, sharp, and useful. This zine turned book (please don’t call it a self-help guide, asks the author) is ultimately about how to be a person in the world. It can be done non-miserably, we promise.
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About the author
Set Sytes was born in the misty, Arthurian woods of England and was raised by bears. He grew up learning how to do and be many things at the same time, including slaying monsters, rescuing damsels in distress, who turned out to be neither in distress nor, in fact, damsels; and commanding great armies, the strategy inevitably being “everybody charge at the enemy.” As the real world struck with a calamitous clang, Set was found wandering the desolate aftermath, completely uncertain about what was now expected of him. He faffed and stumbled around for an embarrassingly long time—sometimes failing quite spectacularly—and then finally turned his hand to the only thing he remembered being any good at as a kid: writing. He was relieved to break the curse of never having finished anything in his life when he finished his first novel, which was okay-ish. Set has since authored many stories of darkness and weirdness and flights of fancy, including the sci-fi–fantasy–western novel WULF, the young adult pirate fantasy India Bones and the Ship of the Dead, the thoroughly twisted dystopian thriller Moral Zero, and the fantasy-horror short story collections Faces in the Dark and Born to be Weird.
Faith G. Harper is a bad-ass, funny lady with a PhD. She is a licensed professional counselor, board supervisor, certified sexologist, and applied clinical nutritionist with a private practice and a consulting and training business in San Antonio, Texas. She has been an adjunct professor and a TEDx presenter and proudly identifies as a woman of color and uppity, intersectional feminist. She is the author of several highly popular “five-minute therapy” zines on subjects such as anxiety, depression, and grief.
Erin Bennett is an award-winning, Los Angeles-based voice actress whose passion for storytelling informs her love of narrating audiobooks. An AudioFile Earphones winner, she has recorded 130 titles for Penguin Random House, Hachette, Harper, Blackstone, Recorded Books, Tantor, Deyan, Dreamscape, and Audible, among others. Her genres vary widely, from literary fiction to mysteries to science fiction to memoir, as well as nonfiction, multicast recordings, and romance. Her recent on-camera work includes Grandfathered on FOX and Children's Hospital on Adult Swim, and her voice-over work spans animation, radio plays for the BBC, video games, and commercials for radio and television.
Tim Bruce has a warm, friendly, characterful voice and works extensively in voice-over, cartoons, and audiobooks. A regular on the BBC, Tim was the voice of Channel 996 for over three years. A long list of audiobook recordings includes the award-winning Blade series, Mark Billingham’s DI Tom Thorne series, Doctor Who, the Oxford Book of War Poetry, and the poetry of William Blake. Tim has also created a whole host of cartoon character voices for CBBC, Nickelodeon, Disney, and Cartoon Network.
