Tag: books

Midnight Grotesques announcement

I am excited, surprised, befuddled – but mainly excited – to be able to announce that Midnight Grotesques will be published by Sublunary Editions in 2023.

What is Midnight Grotesques? MG is a project that US-based artist Michelle Lynn Dyrness and I worked on in a hallucinatory, cross-border collaboration in year two of the pandemic, which will manifest next year in book-object form. In these strange and uncertain times, it really does feel like a small miracle when something like this comes together in the way you’d secretly hoped for.

I don’t delight easily, but I can say I am absolutely delighted to be working with Josh and the Sublunary family again – my book 926 Years, co-authored with the great Kyle Coma-Thompson, was published by Sublunary at the beginning of 2020; they also produced a postcard featuring a poem by Kyle and I with Michelle’s work on the front, and my first major collaboration with Michelle, A Personal History of Attention, was published in Vol. 1 No. 3 of Sublunary’s print journal Firmament. Everything Sublunary does is done with care, professionalism and the weight that each work deserves – MG could not have been given a better home.

More soon.

926 Years reviews + more II

Couple of recent reviews have appeared and both really get to the meat of 926 Years.

Read That Nevertheless Sky We All Live Below by Edwin Turner.

Read An Obscure Constellation by Daniel Davis Wood.

Turner and Davis Wood follow different paths but come to similar conclusions. From David Wood: “To all intents and purposes, the two authors might as well be one.” A real thrill to be written on by two readers I admire a lot.

Sublunary’s publisher Joshua Rothes has also been interviewed at Splice by Davis Wood about the press, how 926 Years came together and on editing Kyle and I. Read Literature More Like Jazz.

Buy 926 Years.

On ‘Fiction as seduction’

Anne Serre interviewSo here’s that other thing I hinted at in the post on my review of The Fool: my interview with French writer Anne Serre has been published by Asymptote.

Fiction as Seduction is part five of my eight questions with writers series. Won’t go into too much detail but I’ve done the work on way more than five interviews, they just haven’t quite worked out… Anne was an absolute delight to work with.

With thanks to Sarah.

On the occasion of the announcement of the forthcoming publication of Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father

Kafka as a boyI have a book coming out.

That’s a sentence I’ve wanted to be able to write for, I don’t know, over a decade now, but, before March this year, wasn’t something I thought I’d be able to say seriously any time soon – if ever. But Transmission Press have spent the period since then patiently working with me to make this thing to be titled Letter to the Author of the Letter to the Father. It brings together the fiction I’ve written over the last three years or so, and the surprising and gratifying thing about it all – at least for me, their humble author – is to see the resonances and recurrences of themes and motifs across narrative styles and POVs and formal play.

It’s surprising because I wrote these stories to tell stories, yes, but also to challenge and entertain myself. To create, to evoke, to help me deal with life on this weird ball – and not with a serious view of binding them together and putting it up for sale.

I’ll write more about it all soon, but for now I’m grateful to Transmission Press for giving my fragmented, melancholy fiction a chance, and giving me so much creative control while also ensuring we’re creating the best collection possible.

Anyway, don’t worry too much about that right now. Instead, pick up a few books from a bookshop or subscribe to a literary journal or join a library, one with beanbags and aircon.