Our overall Book of the Year announcement is coming soon! Get your crackers and paper crowns ready to celebrate.
Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea
Cat says: I was very impressed with the structure of this novel. The narrative splits between two wives, Leah and Miri. Leah has returned from a deep sea mission in a submarine where something has gone badly wrong, her story is concerned with what happened in the submarine, how it sank and they lost control and how her and her colleague coped. When we hear from Miri it is about how Leah has returned changed in some, hard to pin down, sort of way. The keystone of the novel is the mystery of what happened to Leah in the depths of the ocean and both women’s stories move out in different directions from that point.
Emma says: Amy Arnold’s Lori & Joe is a novella about a woman who finds her husband dead one morning. Rather than confront the bodily reality of his death, she walks up the fell by their home in the unusually foggy Lake District. During this journey another kind of confrontation occurs. In rhythmic stream-of-consciousness prose, Arnold creates a meandering thought-train of memory, regret, loss, loneliness and affection, sliced through at points by sharp moments of tragedy.
Sam says: Following on from her Desmond-Elliot prize-winning debut, The Manningtree Witches, A.K. Blakemore’s second novel takes us to the countryside near Lyon in the troubled years just before the first French revolution. It tells the story of Tarare, a young peasant who lives a life slantwise to the events that shook Europe, but who is nonetheless tossed by the convulsions. He is cast out of his village after an act of violence which leaves him with an irrepressible appetite, one which is exploited by those he meets for entertainment. This is a thrilling book that, like Blakemore’s previous novel, locates the point of contention of politics in the bodies of those that have been historically abused and neglected. It is history that thrums with blood, appetite and solidarity.
Brigid Brophy, Hackenfeller’s Ape
“I dare say there’s no more cruelty now than there used to be. But it’s not natural anymore. It’s not unthinking cruelty; it’s neurotic cruelty. War goes on for the same excuses, but it’s suddenly become a problem.”
Emma says: Hackenfeller’s Ape was the first novel by legend & icon, Brigid Brophy, written in 1953 and republished this year through Faber Editions. It’s a short book and its main concern is human/animal dynamics. On one hand, there’s the professor who is studying mating between an unwilling male ape and a horny and despairing female ape in Regents Park Zoo, all the while projecting his own insecurities onto the relationship. On the other, there’s the handsome and mysterious military type who tells the professor that his organisation has bought the male ape to send to space. Scheming ensues as the professor tries to save his beloved ape from oblivion. It’s a funny and sometimes bizarre satire about how modern society brushes aside morality for notions of human progress and how slippery morality can be when it is confused for intellectual authority.
James Clarke, Sanderson’s Isle
Emma says: James Clarke’s Sanderson’s Isle is some sort of thriller set in 1960s England, about a racially ambiguous outsider who comes to London to track down his father. He instead finds himself in a community of free-lovers and acid-party-goers and ends up following Sanderson, a TV presenter, travel writer and egomaniac, on a research trip to the Lake District. It’s a book full of folkloric tendencies toward uncanny Britain, told from the perspective of a soft-hearted cynic.
Tash says: Another debut! I can sometimes find experiments with the form of the novel a bit tiresome – I’m an Edwardian at heart – but Cox’s novel bucked that trend for me. It’s a small book, centred on a group of close friends in their late twenties living in Paris and their visits to their favourite dive bar, located on the titular roundabout. Cox takes this setting as the novel’s structuring principle, a new way of writing group consciousness. Each chapter begins with a paragraph in first-person plural, the group recounting their experience of a particular national event, chorus-style. Having established his hub, Cox gives us the spokes, with the rest of the chapter narrating events whilst cycling through various viewpoints, with every paragraph of the rest of the chapter giving a different character’s perspective on the ongoing action. The word ‘roundabout’ could suggest a kind of imprecision, but if the novel is messy it is a carefully choreographed kind of mess, fitting the restless, melancholy period around the start of your third decade when the headiness of your twenties begins to wane and your friends get further and further away. Cox’s ambition pays off: this is clearly a very considered and thoughtfully crafted novel, and I think it deserves a wider audience. I’m going to be keeping an eye on Will; I’m looking forward to what he does next.
Tash says: When I bought The New Life I wasn’t going to read it immediately. I intended to take it straight home and add it to the pile on my bedside table dedicated to books to be read at a later date, usually when I feel like I have done enough work to have earned something fun. But as much as I like setting my own rules, I also like bending them, so I did what I usually do and read the first couple of lines–just to test the style. Soon enough I had finished the first chapter, and then the second, and by that point, I thought it would be best to just keep on going and finish the whole thing. I’ll let you discover for yourselves what made that first chapter so good, but I really loved this novel: Crewe is a great stylist, and it was a pleasure to read something so vital.
Crewe’s book draws (and then significantly departs) from the real working relationship between poet John Addington Symonds and sexologist Henry Havelock Ellis, and their efforts to shift the Victorian public’s opinion on homosexuality with the publication of their book, Sexual Inversion. John (a married, gay man) and Henry (a straight man married to a gay woman) connect over their shared belief in the injustice of Victorian indecency laws and hope that publishing a scientific study of homosexuality, with anonymised personal accounts, may help to create a more tolerant world. When Oscar Wilde’s arrest threatens the book’s legitimacy, both men have to decide how fully they should live the life demanded by their own convictions, and who they are willing to sacrifice as a result. As a novel about change and political activism, it is unsentimental about the personal collateral and egotism that can often accompany idealism, even as it believes in the object of that idealism. Crewe also writes beautifully, with an attuned sense of the body and the way it moves through the world; a style befitting a novel primarily concerned with sex as a political force. It won the Orwell Prize earlier this year if that sort of thing usually helps to persuade you, but I think it’s fantastic, with or without the accolades.
Cat says: Lydia Davis is one of my all time favourite writers. When I first read her super-short stories in my first year of university I felt a massive possibility that writing and reading this sort of thing was allowed. They’re so short, some are just three lines, some a few pages. I like that and I also like the particular details of life she focuses on, the way she imbues intense, often painful, emotion into small gestures and everyday conversations.
Her output is pretty much consistently excellent so, if you haven’t read her, you could pick up any of her collections and start from there. However with Our Strangers she has decided to only let it be sold at physical bookshops, bookshop.org, and other independent retailers, i.e not Amazon out of solidarity with independent booksellers - thanks Lydia!
Oisín says: Ponyboy was my book of the month in May this year and I have thought about it every month since. It’s devastating auto-fiction in 3 parts - Paris, Berlin and lowa. The 3 parts are a baggy structure that Eliot Duncan puts the story inside. It's about the character [that is kind of nameless at first before kind of going by Ponyboy] moving around relationships with friends, partners, sex, sleep, family, names, countries, addiction and writing. It reads like Eliot was writing part memoir, part lucid-daydream - emailing Paul Preciado, playing Townes Van Zandt and talking to the ghost of Kathy Acker. To me, nonlinear storytelling always feels inherently queer, in this book sort of mimicking the way that the character is always getting close to and then getting away from his transness throughout.
Diana Evans, A House for Alice
Cat says: I read Ordinary People by Diana Evans when it came out in 2019 and it has been one of those books that has stayed with me, with its images coming into my head from time to time. With this in mind I knew I had to read A House for Alice, a loose sequel to Ordinary People.
It has some of the same characters as OP, in particular Melissa and Michael, who are now divorced and in new relationships. We also meet new characters like Melissa’s father Cornelius who dies in a house fire on the same night as the Grenfell Tower Fire, and Alice, her mother who decides after his death to leave London and spend her last years in her home country of Nigeria.
Evans is an absolute master of free indirect discourse, and the book is populated with characters whose minds we move in and out of seamlessly. The broad scope of characters is matched by how much of London she covers as the book moves around the city with the characters. From Kilburn to Peckham, it feels like we’re in the safe hands of a Londoner, or of course several Londoners.
Oisín says: I love this book!!! It’s my JOINT #1 book of the year (with Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H.). Never Was is an experimental sad-boy trans-boy novel by H. Gareth Gavin. Never Was is the place the where the story is set, it’s 'a place for lost dreams disappointments and things that never came to be'. I've never read anything else like it. The main character is in Never Was but doesn't really know where what that is or how they ended up there. The book follows the main character Fin telling their story ~ a scrappy, foggy, remembering or misremembering of a working-class upbringing, a memory of childhood friends, complicated family members and how gender interrupts and cuts through all these stories - into the person that is storytelling in the moment. There are so many stories in this book. H. Gareth Gavin is so good at giving a voice to everything - all characters and the world they’re in - it's experiential but not messy, it's a life story but not boring, the roots of all the references are so vivid and real that it's weird.
Emma says: Love, Leda was written in the 60s by the late Mark Hyatt, published this year by Peninsula Press. It’s a diaristic account of a queer working-class drifter who journeys through Soho, sofa-surfing, cruising and getting a bit of work here and there. Leda is unattached to a home, job or partner but finds moments of comfort and intimacy among a community of gay men and divorced women. His voice is straightforward and endearing, allowing the reader to stay close behind his distant gaze and feel his loneliness in a city full of people.
Sam says: I was delighted that this fantastically innovative novel made it to the Booker longlist! But I’ll leave it to Antony to give his verdict, as he called it so early (we miss you Ant!)
Sam says: How could I resist these annals of resistance? This book, like So, contains multitudes. It is a debut collection of stories that takes in a lifetime spent thinking, through language, how history might yet be different, if we only to look at it differently. And how our future might yet be better, if we learn, through that alterity, to reject the binaries through which we’ve been taught to view ourselves. Wildly innovative and capacious in its generosity, Truth & Dare is by turns joyful, anarchic, moving, filthy, funny and unforgettable. Give yourself the present of So’s gift this Xmas and change your past, future and everything in between!
If you’re looking for that sat-on-the-sofa-putting-Celebrations-in-your-face (slash delayed on an 8 hour train ride) all-absorbing Christmas hamper of a novel, then this is it. It’s twenty-seven years since Ann-Marie McDonald broke and mended readers’ hearts with her Canadian epic Fall On Your Knees, and she’s back at it. We’re in nineteenth-century Scotland this time, where she and her playful protagonist take on the whole canonical bookshelf, from Darwin to Orlando via James, the Brontës, Dickens, Scott and more… it really is quality street. There’s bogs, tutors, castles, American ingenues, an asylum, unlikely siblings, mean aunts, and above all a queer joie de vivre that keeps you utterly compelled, even through the worst of what the Victorian era could do to people of marginalised genders. A delight.
Deena Mohamed, Your Wish is My Command
Written, illustrated and translated into English by triple-treat Deena Mohamed, Your Wish is My Command (aka Shubeik Lubeik) is an utterly gorgeous graphic novel of three intertwined wishes by three Cairenes, whose narration of hopes, dreams, fears, traumas and connections will haunt you for a long time. Wishes, in Mohamed’s otherwise world, have become a hot commodity mined in Egypt and sold on the global market, subject to strict regulation that parodies both the dreamy whimsy of fairy tales and the destructive whimsy of state legislation. What can ordinary people do, how can they live and love, when their very imagination is for sale? As full of stunning graphic invention as it is of bittersweet wisdom, this is an instant legend.
Cat says: This novel is about money, power, class, race and sex. The character is quite outrageous. She is having an affair with a famous photographer, who she has incredible sex with but who has told her they can’t carry on sleeping together because it’s too intense. He still invites her to be his plus one at big events, something which she wonders might be to do with the fact that as a rich white man, he looks better with a brown woman on his arm.
She is infatuated with him, so much so that she also becomes interested in anyone who has also had an affair with him, including one woman whose Instagram she obsesses over. This woman is a rich, white, influencer-type who has curated for herself a beautiful life online.
The book is written in casual fragments with titles like ‘nepotism it girl’ and ‘first of all i didn’t miss the red flags i looked at them and thought yeah that’s sexy.’ This character treats people badly, but the book is very funny and it has important things to say about whiteness, art, gender and where they meet.
Cat says: Mrs S, set in the 1990s, about a lesbian affair in an all girls’ boarding school between the narrator, who has taken up the job as matron in the school and the eponymous Mrs S, the headteacher’s wife.
It is definitely sexy, the will-they-won’t-they aspect of the plot is paced very well before opening up into a fully blown secret affair. Hung over all of it, however is the sad and frustrating atmosphere of a homophobic society, Section 28 was a law that forbade the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools and was in effect from 1988-2003. The knowledge that the novel is set in this time period gives the affair its doomed romantic quality. We don't ever believe that Mrs S is likely to leave her husband and the protection that their relationship gives her as part of the status quo and we can grieve with the narrator about this, but Mrs S too must suffer this lose, her queerness being secret and shameful, not having the chance to fully realise all the types of people she could love, erotically and otherwise.
One of the things I found most interesting about this novel was the distinctions between different types of queerness. How does homophobia affect the narrator, a young butch woman, who people read as gay in different ways to Mrs S, an older, femme and (possibly) bi woman? How does their queerness manifest itself distinctly from how it would in our own time? Would the narrator now think of themselves as a woman at all? There is an important moment between the two characters when Mrs S talks to her lover about why she binds her breasts, whether this means she wants to be a man. Mrs S wants an explanation,‘But she doesn’t understand. And yet understanding is everything to her, she cannot see the ego in it, her need to grasp it all, rather than accept what she does not know.’
I felt moved by this difference between the queer characters (lesbians in a broad sense), them talking during and after sex, the attempt to understand each other and the sometimes failure of this, that they were set up to fail and that they didn’t have the liberty to keep on trying.
Leone Ross (editor), Glimpse: An Anthology of Black British Speculative Fiction
As you’d expect from the author of This One Sky Day, this anthology edited by Leone Ross spills marvels: every story is a surprise and yet they build a fantastic multi-faceted world together, one that draws on Afrofuturism with a witty British slant. Everyone will have a favourite story (I was thrilled by Patience Agbabi’s smooth move from poetry to prose), and the collection gathers queens of the form like Irenosen Okojie with fresh voices. You’ll want more from all of them. There’s stories that unfold magically on balconies, in urban parks, under the sea, and in inner space – and keep unfolding. A definitional and thrilling collection.
Adania Shibli, Minor Detail, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette
Adania Shibli is a genius, and her books are diamonds: so much ache and fury and beauty compacted into perfectly-weighted words. Minor Detail asks what happens when one individual act becomes the lens through which we see a century of history, as that one, ramifying act – a Palestinian woman captured and raped by Israeli soldiers during the Nakba – also turns, through its facets, into a detail that exemplifies and unfolds and bears that bigger history. Scalpel-delicate, Minor Detail will introduce you to a world-class writer who will not be silenced.
Isabel Waidner, Corey Fah Does Social Mobility
Sam says: Following in the radiant, revolutionary and gleefully disruptive vein of their previous novels, Isabel Waidner’s new novel begins with a writer winning a big literary prize. Things start to go sideways when Corey tries to collect it. From here the novel catalogues and skewers how mass culture continually represses and exploits the marginalised voices it pretends to uplift. Like Isabel’s previous novels Corey Fah moves with an irrepressible energy, estranging the familiar and showing how strange are the things we take as given!
Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, translated by Grace Frick
Sam says: An oldie but a goodie, and one which I only encountered for the first time this year. Hadrian, the third of the so-called ‘Five Good Emperors’, ruled the Roman Empire at the height of its power at the end of the first century. He supposedly wrote a memoir, which was lost to time. In the 1940s Yournecar attempted to imagine what this book might have looked like, and this novel is the result. I was blown away. It is a breathtaking work of imaginative empathy; a double feat in that she not only imagines what might have mattered to a man who lived two millennia ago, but how he would have wanted to be remembered. At the heart of it is a tragic story of queer love, and the excesses of grief made possible by having the resources of the world at his disposal. Beautiful, haunting and strange.
CA Conrad, You don’t have what it takes to be my nemesis
Oisín says: What I love about CA Conrad’s writing is that there is no difference between life and writing - it’s all there. They are writing “(soma)tic poetry.” Soma is a sanskrit that means ‘to press and be newly born’ and Somatic means ‘relating to the body’. They are really embodied in their writing, but so is everything else - animals around them, friends who have died from AIDS and ecosystems both environmental and political. They write with an urgency that totally rejects political apathy and so belongs to this moment (and every other one before). The language is economic and relatable, the form is kind of dreamlike but laid out like a desire path - we can follow them intuitively and they’re made by us all together.
Nicola Davies, The Star Whale, illustrated by Petr Horáček
So says: If you’re looking to celebrate and explore the living world with young (or any) readers or eco-activists in your life, turn to The Star Whale, a truly beautiful fusion of poetry and visual art. Unusually for a picture book, artist Petr Horáček’s paintings came first, and writer Nicola Davies responded to the poetry of their vivid colours and glorious shapes that move through the marvels of the living world around us. As Davies writes in the title poem:
Brimming eyes emoji. A picture book you’ll be able to enjoy again and again.
Sam says: In his brief, tragic but beautiful life, the time given to Mark to write was briefer still. After an abusive childhood, he learned to read and write when he was thirteen. When he ended his life in the 70s, his poems were almost lost, but for the intervention of other poets who drove overnight to collect and Xerox them. Out of this small window of time, he bathes us in light. Beautiful, melancholic, wry and liltingly musical, his poems chronicle his struggles with depression, rejection and the legacy of his childhood abuse. They also speak of boredom, horniness, curiosity, altogether of a fertile and fragile intelligence, which shone for far too short a time.
Eileen Myles, a “Working Life”
Oisín says: a “Working Life” is the poetry collection that I’ve been waiting for. It’s the first Myles collection since Evolution in 2018 - it’s Myles at their most direct and their most wide somehow at the same time. The poems hold all of the dualities of our daily, working lives. They travel from small rooms when the pandemic was outside, to planes and drives across the changing landscape of America, to small moments inside cups of coffee and interactions with lovers or dogs. This is Myles really looking at our present moment and our environment being destroyed by greed, selfishness, individualism (capitalism) and meeting it with deep, radical noticing (care). Eileen Myles is anyone’s poet, the language is interested in vernacular and the way we share it with each other.
Mickaël Correia, A People’s History of Football, translated by Fionn Petch
So says: If you like your football grassroots, community-owned, politically-radical, antifa, anti-corruption, feminist and on the barricades, this Eric Cantona drop-kick of a book is for you. Correia, a social issues journalist in France, loves the beautiful game for itself and twines it into a brilliant thread through a long century of solidarity, protest and collective power. So if the Boxing Day games/transfer market shenanigans are getting you down (or cheering you up), let A People’s History speed you into the new year with some exhilarating new chants from Argentina to the Arab Spring.
Louise Erdrich, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Travelling through the Land of My Ancestors
So says: Blessings upon Daunt Books for republishing this gem (selfishly, because I lent my National Geographic original to someone who never returned it, argh). Louise Erdrich is a firm Burley Fisher fave (and Nobel Prize bet). If we got you into her incredible lockdown novel The Sentence, you’ll love this non-fiction iteration of Erdrich the bookseller and Ojibwe writer of place and community (and if you haven’t read her fiction, this travel memoir is a great place to get to know her work). With her 18 month old daughter, Erdrich canoes islands that are living libraries, pictographic records of stories, dreams and myth, linking this long, long tradition of her people’s writing to her own. A gorgeous book to get lost in, for armchair or other travellers.
Oisín says: Hijab Butch Blues by Lamya H. is so good and my #1 book of the year. It's a memoir about Lamya figuring out their sexuality and gender identity and thinking it through their religion - loosely punctuating the book with stories from the Quran. God being the start and end of those questions about your identity felt big and relatable. If the gap between you and God is small in all other areas of your life - your home, your friends house, your school, the playground - then why would the gap be bigger these inward questions? And why would you shy away from asking what this means your God looks like? In the book Lamya starts questioning these things around 14 and has a cool, relentless way of dragging their faith over to meet their politics throughout as they grow up. The book is a fraying knot of their faith and their queerness, feminism, friendships, anti-racism. A coming of age, a building up of their core beliefs and worldview - the big stuff and the small stuff.
I hadn't really read something like this before - the way that the book holds its stories and beliefs so strongly and pokes them all the time, but never starts from a place of rejection. It starts from a place more curious and goes to places more wobbly, while also unambiguously naming things like white supremacy, racism, homophobia, ignorance or the clunky clashing that can happen on butch + butch dates. The directions it moves in feel true to live and hard to write. I wanted to keep reading even when it's done.
Oisín says: Daddy Boy is Emerson Whitney’s second book and first UK release (thank you Cipher Press!). The book navigates the end of a 10-year relationship with a dominatrix they called Daddy. Living in a tent in the back garden of their shared house, figuring out what life will look like now, they connect with something else inside of them, older than submission - tornado chasing. While the narrative follows them on a bus, as part of a storm-chasing group - the form of the book is not a straight story. Whitney brings in all varied references; anecdotes from the road, phone calls from home, memories from the decade gone, past versions of themselves and a first draft of the book you’re reading
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]]>Thanks to funding support from Arts Council England, BFDay23 Festival will take place 21-23 September at two fully accessible local spaces, St Peter de Beauvoir and Young Space.
Our programme celebrates new books from 2023, with a number of debut authors including Granta 40 Under 40 honoree K Patrick and Forward Prize shortlistee Kandace Siobhan Walker. Headline events include in-depth conversations between: Goldsmiths’ Prize winners M. John Harrison and Isabel Waidner, discussing experiments in rewriting place and class, novelists Alison Rumfitt and Rivers Solomon, on new queer horror, and Octavia Bright and Rebecca May Johnson on thinking the body through writing.
Events are taking place on Thursday and Friday evenings, and then ALL DAY on Saturday
Thursday 21st:
7PM, Free: BFDay23 x Prototype: Art-Writing-Art Writing with Chloe Aridjis and Lucy Ives + Prototype Prize Launch @ Youngspace 85-87 Southgate Road, London N1 3JS [Google pin]
Friday 22nd:
7PM, £8: BFDay23: Space Crone Prize & Incubation: a space for monsters at St Peter De Beauvoir Town, Northchurch Terrace, London N1 4DA [Google pin]
Saturday 23rd:
All events taking place at St Peter De Beauvoir Town, Northchurch Terrace, London N1 4DA [Google pin]
The festival is spread over 3 spaces, so some events overlap.
There is a drop-in zine fair, free, no booking required, from 12pm! With:
Toothgrinder // Sticky Fingers // Electric Frog // Elspeth Walker // If a Leaf Falls // Pigeon // Anh Chan // Think Big, Read Library
Kids events
1030-1100, Free (sold out): BFDay23 x Discover: The Best Worst Day Ever
1130-1200, Free (sold out): BFDay23 x Discover: Not Yet a Yeti
Adult events
1200-1300, £6: Love, London (James Clarke, Gurnaik Johal, Naomi Pearce, chaired by Mazin Saleem)
1300-1400, £6: Music, Magic, Mystery (Eliza Henry-Jones, Patrick Langley, Nadia Attia, chaired by Catherine Madden)
1330-1430, £6: Never Was Here (H. Gareth Gavin, Amy Arnold, Guy Gunaratne, chaired by Adam Zmith)
1430-1530, £6: Novel vs Verse (Dawn Watson, Jen Calleja, Lisa Robertson, chaired by Nisha Ramayya)
1500-1600, £6: Powers of Horror (Alison Rumfitt & Rivers Solomon, chaired by Sasha de Buyl)
1600-1700, £6: We Need New Maps (Alice Maddicott, Tim Burrows, Noreen Masud, chaired by Jenny Chamarette)
1630-1730, £6: Grace & Fire (Octavia Bright & Rebecca May Johnson, chaired by Peter Scalpello)
1800-1900, £6: Weird Works (M. John Harrison & Isabel Waidner, chaired by Samuel Fisher)
1930-2030, £6: Poetry Showcase (K Patrick, Kandace Siobhan Walker, Oluwaseun Olayiwola, Daisy LaFarge)
From 2030 onwards there will be drinks in the crypt to end the night!
Readings will be recorded and made available subsequently via Burley Fisher’s Isolation Station podcast
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Quantum Listening, Pauline Oliveros
Emma says...
Quantum Listening was a lecture from 1999 by Pauline Oliveros, expanding on Deep Listening - a meditation practice focusing on sound from within, sound from one’s environment and the ever-changing relationship between the two. Deep Listening promises to take us ‘below the surface of our consciousness’ and ‘dissolve limiting boundaries’ by illuminating the interconnectedness between all sounds and, in turn, all things. Following on from this practice, Quantum Listening explores the community value of enhanced sensory perception in the technological age and fantasises about a future in which empathy is built through unspoken bonds, the exchange of sonic energy and trespass into the imagination, unreality and the mystery of the universe. The reader of this chapbook is invited to listen to everything, in as many ways as possible, and bring about social change by starting from within. Beautifully concise and argued with calm precision. Profoundly psychedelicious. Recommended reading setting: dawn or dusk.
Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping, Derek Jarman
A luminous novella brief and bright as a shooting star. In 1972, Derek Jarman published his first and only poetry collection (A Finger in the Fishes Mouth, available from Prototype) with the phrase Through the Billboard… on its back cover. In the same year, he wrote this extended journey narrative - let’s call it a trip, in all senses - but never published it. Declan Wiffen’s deep-dive poetic afterword, along with Philip Hoare’s elegant foreword, a biographical sketch by Jarman’s friend and housemate Michael Ginsborg, and an impassioned final note by publisher Gareth Evans add layers to this labour of love, a postcard from the wild and technicolor edges of American culture that seared into Jarman’s brain.
Heritage Aesthetics, Anthony Anaxagarou
Sam says...
Cane, Corn & Gully, Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa
So says...
Choreography as chronicle, music as medicine: this first collection changes everything, flexing poetry to its fullness with the rhythms of Caribbean dances crossing the pages and resonating with powerful words. Welcoming in ancestral voices of all kinds - verbal, gestural, spiritual, rooted - Safiya Kamaria Kinshasa listens through her words to a black West Indian past-present-future, suffused with continuities of rage and grace. Here is one of this generous book’s guest choreographers, the bearded fig tree, leaving a note to accompany the hand-drawn labanotation of its elliptic and embracing moves:
Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus, Signe Gjessing, translated by Denise Newman
So says...
Extremely seasonal stocking stuff, filled with silk, stars, snow and a deadpan sense of beauty. If you think that a soaring poetic glow-up of Wittgenstein’s famously incomprehensible Ph.D thesis couldn’t make you lol (and see language differently), challenge accepted. Short, sharp, sensational.
Handbound greetings to the wonderful clientele of Burley Fisher Books. Did you know we stock zines?
If you’re looking for self-published artist books, handmade zines, small press pamphlets and specialist magazines then you’re in the right plane of existence! Come on down and dig into our zine section for an idea of our offerings or peruse a selection of recommendations below - available in-store only!
Poetry
Fiction
Anthologies/Mags
Visual Art
Look out for our stocking stuffers part 2, featuring new poetry, small books and zines, coming soon.
But first, a drumroll for our...
Journeys Across Breath: Poems 1975-2005, Stephen Watts
For the last 40 years, Stephen Watts has been a fixture of the landscape and the language of East London. Whether that be in his own poetry, or in the many translations he has produced, his influence, while not always obvious, has left indelible traces.
Sam says:
Just after we opened the shop, Stephen’s book Republic of Birds/Republic of Dogs was published - a beautifully fragmentary account of Stephen’s transplantation from the outer Hebrides to the Isle of Dogs in the 80s. Having been lost in a drawer for over 30 years it became a central text for our new bookshop. So I am delighted that collected here, for the first time, is three decades of his poetry - a real treasury
Ant Says:
Bird-flight is music, language is freedom, breath is laughter
from ‘Journeys Across Breath’
It’s hard to find a poet that speaks as timelessly about east London as Stephen Watts. A quality that Watts’ poetry has is the ability to encompass all perspectives at once; the reader feels as if it isn’t a person speaking to them, but rather the place itself. The rhythms of the street move through every line, the images are at once familiar yet otherworldly. Journeys Across Breath is a joy to read as a whole anthology as various images arise and reoccur, spinning the reader into a heady atmosphere where time dissolves:
Windows candled to Friday night,
Would know this street is a seamless cloth, this
City, this people…
(‘Brick Lane’)
Windows of crushed coffee bleating
In the deep blue of Aldgate night
(from ‘Fieldgate Streets’)
The feeling of the collection is best found in the title poem ‘Journeys Across Breath’ where Watts addresses his grandfather whose steps he can hear descending a mountain road in Italy. The poem moves from these mountains to Soho where Watts looks at his mother across a cafe in Frith Street in 1912. Watts explains to his grandfather that his ‘university’ was three years spent on a remote island in north Uist, beyond Skye. It was here Watts learnt about sound by testing his mother-tongue against silence. Stories such as this amass on Watts’ journey and pour from each poem in this collection. A magical read.
Bolla, Pajtim Statovci, translated by David Hackston
Ant says...
Pajtim Statovci returns with BOLLA, the story of Arsim and Miloš, a relationship born in secrecy and torn apart by the horrors of the Kosovo War. In a struggle to rebuild their lives after their separation, the two men commit atrocities both in their family lives and, in bitter self-loathing, to themselves and one another. As in his previous novel 'Crossing', Statovci masterfully conveys the human struggle in balance with a greater myth, in this case the Bolla serpent that breathes destruction into the plot. Statovci brings the reader closer to his characters than any other writer — BOLLA is a tale of great tragedy but is written with such depth that its humanity always prevails. An absolute blinder.
Ant says...
Hernan Diaz is officially two for two. His first book IN THE DISTANCE from Daunt Books Publishing was a revelation. TRUST sees Diaz continuing his written exploration of the foundations of America with similar aplomb and originality… Diaz leads the reader through a sequence of mirages made up of various versions of the life of Andrew Bevel, a New York business tycoon who rises to glory in the wake of the 1929 crash. The novel’s genius lies in its gradual revealing of Bevel’s wife Mildred who has been forced into the shadows of her husband’s success. By bringing Mildred to the fore, Diaz forces the reader to reassess the accounts of Bevel’s life that they’ve been told, and fallen for, throughout the book.
Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez, translated by Megan McDowell
Ant says...
In this sprawling epic of weird fiction and dark fantasy Mariana Enriquez steps away from the distilled excellence of her short stories (What We Lost in the Fire, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed) to tell the story of Juan and Gaspar, a father and son on the run in Argentina from an organization called the Order. The novel shows how the Argentinian population has lived in fear at the hand of the ruling dicatorship’s cruelty and torture, the Order has fed off this fear to snatch and torture victims to feed the Darkness, a force only its members can tap into and control. Juan is desperate for his son to escape the Order’s clutches and be relieved of their dangerous powers before he dies from a heart condition. Between the forests, caves and cities of Argentina, to acid-fuelled psychedelic 60s London and into other worlds beyond ours, Our Share of Night blends folklore, politics and fantasy to follow father and son on their quest to be free from the clutches of evil by any means necessary.
Sam says...
Maud Martha is the only novel by the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and it’s just been re-issued in a handsome volume by Faber. It’s an absolute gem, a series of vignettes in the life of the eponymous main character, from her childhood to life in an apartment building on the South Side of Chicago. It’s basically a high literary version of the meme: expectation vs reality. It’s a real pleasure to read (the rhythms of the prose really let you know that you’re in the hands of a poet), while also being structurally slyly subversive. It stays with you!
When I Sing, Mountains Dance, Irene Sola, translated by Mara Faye Lethem
Sam says...
This book is a singing, dancing, grunting, barking joy – a song to the mountains and a cry against the Anthropocene. It takes place in a small community in the Catalan Pyrenees, following the misadventures of a family who live there, and the lives (human, non-human, and spirit) that intersect with them. With one section described by the lightning, and another by a deer, this novel delights and surprises at every turn!
The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft
So says...
Or possibly the book of the millennium! If you’re feeling a bit it’s-the-end-of-the-world and/or want to know more about Ukrainian borders and/or love a mind-bending historical novel with an angel’s eye view, or just looking for a book that will keep you going through the whole holiday season, look no further. Tokarczuk doesn’t just write this history, she lives it, with pitch-perfect epistolary chapters, rip-roaring adventures, and deep dives into characters’ lives that mingle psychological realism with metaphysical acuity. In short, this book has a bit of everything, including the reason that God is like an oyster. The Books of Jacob is a magnum opus by a Nobel winner, and an incredibly absorbing read that does politics, belief, history, and sex, in an unstoppable flow.
Deceit, Yuri Felsen, translated by Bryan Karetnyk
Dan says...
One of the pleasures of being a bookseller is being able to be a small part of a fantastic, unlikely story. This year it was my pleasure to support the sterling work of translator and archivist Bryan Karetnyk in his resurrection of a forgotten, marginal figure from the post-revolutionary Russian diaspora. Yuri Felsen was a writer of rare talent, whose legacy (and life) was obliterated by the grotesque National Socialist Machine. At the time, many (not without cause) likened Felsen to the great Proust. Owing to his tragic fate, Felsen was largely forgotten until his resurrection through the efforts of Bryan and the fantastic Prototype.
Deceit is a gentle, funny work about a listless romantic obsession. It has a dreamlike, almost timeless quality. It is a work that we should not be reading, but we are. What a joy.
The Absolute, Daniel Guebel, translated by Jessica Sequeira
Dan says...
I love Argentine fiction so much because of its particular suffusion of the mundane with gravitas, the injection of magic and the surreal into the everyday, tempered by a heavy dose of intellectual irony. The best examples of this work: Borges, Macedonio Fernandez, send your head swimming and prise open what is possible. In Daniel Guebel, these writers have found a worthy successor. The Absolute is in some ways a classic intergenerational tale, only one that follows a clan of artists - the Deliuskin-Scriabins - whose artistic obsessions border on the occult. In gorgeous prose (lushly translated by Jessica Sequeira), we see members of this family invent experimental noise music, create protective sound barriers around Grigori Rasputin at the height of the pre-revolutionary era of intrigue. This is a tale of modernity, of art’s relationship to the dark forces of the twentieth century. This is a must.
The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho, Paterson Joseph
So says...
A rollicking read that’s also an eye-opener on English history and a new view on the palaces and alleyways of Georgian London, traversed by the unique figure of Charles Ignatius Sancho, actor, composer, musician, freedman, husband, father, and self-made man. This fabulous novel has all the dynamic power and full-bodied excellence of Paterson Joseph’s incredible work as an actor: Sancho leaps off the page, vivid in his self-confidence and self-delusion, his deep love and determination. If you’re in or visiting London, you’ll be incredibly tempted to set off for an Ignatius Sancho walk or walks, with Joseph’s/Sancho’s voice in your ear, bringing the city to life in all its complexities, from a dancehall to slavers to markets to grand theatre, as Sancho traverses spaces and classes, all the while acutely observing the coloniser. It really does feel like reading a secret diary (*full* of gossip), sprung fresh from the archive to redress the exclusion of Black Britons from literary history. An absolute treat.
Liberation Day, George Saunders
Sam says...
George Saunders loves Big Feelings. Not just in the sense of feelings that are strongly felt, but also affect that has a wide effect. He is the poet of Workplaces and Nations, and the climates of feelings which shape and define them. In Liberation Day, his most recent collection and his first since winning the Booker, everything is turned up to 11 - he has perfected all of the quirks that make his writing so singular and powerful, and turned the dial on all of them. This has the strange effect of producing some of both his best and worst stories. The title story is among the former, a Hegelian nightmare of historical re-enactment using human robots in the front room of Near Future America. It is a piano wire of story that resonates with righteous fury. It’s so good, that on the strength of it alone, this book is pretty unmissable. At Christmas, we all need a designated driver, and whether you’re an old fan or new to his work, you know you’re always in safe hands with ol’ George.
Emma says...
“People liked the life I showed them. The Stepford Wife, that's how they knew me. And my brand really did say it all, who I was - housewifery was my rebellion.”
Waiting for Ted is written from the perspective of an Instagram tradwife, exiled from her upper class family home after moving in with her working class partner, Ted. Rosalind waits for Ted to come home, readying herself with essential oils, lotions, powders and scents for his return. Cracks in the relationship and cracks in dried foundation deepen throughout the book, as episodic reflections illuminate fractures within the British class system, postmodern feminism and suburban living. This first person account of a broken relationship becomes increasingly unhinged, fluctuating between paranoia, egotism, delusion, denial and acceptance.
Emma says...
“... by their seventh autumn, Bell and Sigh rarely used the spray oil because they were no longer able to hear the smallest noises made by the aging house: the scheduled cracks, the nocturnal clinking of pipes, the whisper of the refilling cistern, the chatter of the loose gutter. The house’s smallest noises seemed to take place inside their bodies, then. Each one was as quiet and as manifest as the pop of a joint; the grumble of a stomach, the glug of a sinus.”
Seven Steeples celebrates the simple matter of time passing. The reader does not encounter any drama, jeopardy or action; there is hardly even a plot. What we are instead offered is a life shared by two people who move from the city to an isolated house in the Irish countryside. The landscape changes and then changes back. Clothes are worn through, fixed, and worn again. The dogs grow old; the house grows old, but our characters exist in a state of suspension, having separated themselves from family, community, the labour economy and all concepts of progress and productivity that go with those things. ‘Seven Steeples’ is the opposite of an epic but the feeling of its poetry is a combination of quietness and rapture. Nominated for the Goldsmiths Prize 2022.
Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain, Matthew Green
Ant says...
Step into the darkness of Britain’s Shadowlands with Dr Matthew Green as your guide. Weaving tales of abandoned villages, drowned Medieval port towns, the echoing hymns of forgotten communities and the haunted ruins of ‘ghost outposts’, Shadowlands is both a restless eulogy and prescient reminder of civilisation’s inevitable decay. From the far-flung island of St. Kilda, to the ‘Medieval Manhattan’ of New Winchelsea, each chapter is an open pool of poetic analysis and storytelling. Green is a fireball of knowledge and wit, drawing the reader further into his kingdom of loss. Shadowlands is a kryptonite gem that will live long in the reader’s memory. See also Matt’s brilliant tours of London at: http://unrealcityaudio.co.uk/
Landscapes of Silence: From Childhood to the Arctic, Hugh Brody
Ant says...
Take a moment’s pause within Hugh Brody’s tapestries of silence. Brody draws on close experience living with silence. From the Inuit communities in Sanikiluaq, Arctic Quebec where he uncovers Inuit traditions but also disturbing evidence of abuse and the effects of colonialism, to the hills of England and his experience growing up in a Jewish family in Sheffield where the silence of the unsaid haunted his childhood. Brody shows that silence is an underrated experience in life and an often negatively portrayed quality in people. Landscapes of Silence explores what it means to be silent, and how that translates back into our lived experience. It is not only beautifully written, it is an increasingly necessary book to read in our current world.
Front Lines: Trans Journalism 2007-2021, Juliet Jacques
So says...
Grouped into sections titled Politics, Media and Arts, Front Lines is a book that - like its author - repeatedly crosses all lines between them, including a brilliant intro that lays out the journalism and publishing landscape, and the economics of writing over the last 15 years. You’ve probably read some of the pieces in here, because over a decade and a half, Jacques has written for an astonishing variety of publications on a dazzling array of subjects. Reading them all together, though, is a total rush: a vivid document of an intense era in which the ‘trans tipping point’ and fascist transphobia are concurrent, and the interweaving thoughts of an original thinker. From football to Detransition, Baby: get you a writer who can do both.
Sam says...
This new book on writing, by novelist Amina Cain, has a dawn-like quality, illuminated by that associative clarity that you feel just after you wake, and which haunts you for the rest of the day. In a series of short chapters which read like exploded diary entries, she unearths gems from the writers who have informed her art and her life, and holds them up to the light. Questing, curious and partial, this is the perfect Christmas read for anyone in your life who needs permission to spend a bit more time in pursuit of beauty.
All About Love: New Visions, bell hooks
So says...
“When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another’s spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abuse cannot coexist.”
Our 2022 bestseller, a testament to how visionary bell hooks’ “new visions” remain in tackling the central question of “what is love?” - and what we also need to unlearn to love fully. Arguing for love as a transformative political dynamic, bell hooks lays out a necessarily expansive vision that moves away from the myth of the closed romantic dyad as a heteropatriarchal colonial con and towards a beautiful embrace of deep friendship and companionship and chosen family. This is a book that feels like a much-needed hug from a beloved (and much-missed) auntie. Whether the holiday season is joyful or difficult for you, it's one to carry with you and carry you through.
The Dusty Knuckle, Max Tobias, Rebecca Oliver and Daisy Terry
Sam says...
When it comes to sandwiches, these guys have changed the game (booksellers eat a lot of sandwiches, so I should know). What makes them stand out, though, is their delicious bread. Potato sourdough. Fluffy focaccia. And now, they’ve put all their secrets in this book that you can buy for only £20. Fools!
Aside from their excellent recipes, they are also a social enterprise and have helped loads of people in Hackney and Haringey back into work. So: buy their book, bake their bread - nourish and be nourished!
Sam says...
Shaped by her Italian, Mexican and Brazilian upbringing, Ixta Belfrage’s cookbook is a joyful fusion of familiar flavours, given fresh life by bringing them into unfamiliar contexts and combinations. Playful (crumpet croutons!), flavoursome (Chicken with Pineapple and Ndjua) and accessible (tasty, tasty, fried bread), you’ll find yourself turning over the corner of every page. Perfect opportunity to bring some sunshine into your kitchen this winter.
Tyger, SF Said, illustrated by Dave McKean
Dan says...
TYGER is the new opus by beloved children’s author SF Said. We absolutely love this one – Said has achieved something so difficult in a children’s book: the gentle portrayal of complicated, challenging themes in a way that loses none of their moral urgency.
The book is set in a parallel, arrested 21st century London, in the midst of an oppressive lingering of the British Empire. We follow Adam and Zadie, two children whose fates are tied together with the eponymous Tyger – an interdimensional, Blakean avatar who is being hunted by the villainous Maldehyde.
But it’s not all intense foreboding! It’s also a rip-roaring half-term read. Said is a master of adventure, and Tyger is a worthy successor to the Varjak series.
There is something in this for everyone. The book’s genius is how it shines a light upon our own world: both the grim tyrannies which pepper our every day, and of the humble power of resistance. A remarkable tale of fantastic London.
So says...
A delicious addition to the world of picture books: a celebration of markets, cooking, and fresh food that combines a sweet and sensory short story of going to the Sunday market (look out for Claude the dog!) with cool and colourful facts to share about food and flowers. An energetic entry into a love of food and cooking, and a warm reminder to be conscious of where our food comes from and all the people who make it possible for us to eat, wrapped up in a bright string bag of a book.
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So recommends…
The Glass Pearls, Emeric Pressburger
Karl Braun lodges in a shared house in Pimlico and works as a piano tuner. He always logs his telephone calls, and is always on time for his clients. He remembers the death of his wife during the Second World War. He buys discount tickets for classical concerts, and steps out with the young woman who found him his rented room, and is attracted to his melancholy secretiveness. His neighbour assumes that Karl is a Jewish emigré, like him. His English colleagues and customers, incurious, never imagine that he is a Nazi surgeon hiding from a war crimes trial, wrapped in a tissue of lies.
Emeric Pressburger's second novel is a psychological tour-de-force about complicity, a ferociously ironic novel that satirises the genteel style of English literary fiction to tear into the notion of a European civilisation. As atmospheric and haunting as you'd expect from one of the greatest ever screenwriters, especially in its observation of shabby, narrow-minded, pretentious pre-Swinging Sixties' London, it's a brutal and brilliant page-turner about everyday fascism and the refusal to see that makes it possible.
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
Damon Copperhead’s mom is a survivor and addict living in a trailer on her friend the Peggots’ property. His Melungeon dad, drowned in the Devil’s Bathtub, was the son of a strict man-hating Christian over in Tennessee. Yes, she’s called Betsy. Demon, as he gets nicknamed, gets thrown into foster carelessness, inspired by a teacher, pulled into opioid addiction through his love for the grief-stricken Dori, and – in a heart-stopping set piece as jittery as anything in Breaking Bad – very nearly shot during a flood. In one small Appalachian community, the failures of the American corporate state play out, just as the brutalities of Victorian paternalism do in David Copperfield. Kingsolver’s novel is a furious, breathtaking work of art that takes on not only Dickens’ characters, narrative webs, and themes but also the humanist breadth and wit of his language, made fresh for the twenty-first century, listening to how resourceful, abandoned people tell their own and each other's stories.
Sam recommends
A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel
Hilary Mantel's epic novel about the first French Revolution was her first (though not the first to be published), and took 20 years to write. I picked it up on a whim in the weeks after my mum died (on the promise of the title) and the escape it offered makes the experience of reading it indelible. It swirls around Danton, Robespierre and Camile Desmoulins, sweeping from cafés and drawing rooms to desperate streetlights and bloody executions. What makes it so unforgettable (and so full of solace) is how, among the stampede of events that shaped the coming centuries, she never loses the gossamer threads that tie these three figures at the centre together: the moments where they break bread together are as memorable as the storming of the Bastille. That was Mantel's gift – she was a great humanist (and republican), we're going to miss her voice, I'll always be grateful for this book and the place it provided!
The Three Body Problem Trilogy, Liu Cixin (trans. Ken Liu and Joel Martinson)
I know I'm a little late to this but, wow. First contact writing like you've never read before. Starting during the cultural revolution and ending tens of thousands of years into the future Liu manages to blend game theory, string theory, quantum theory and just about every theory you can think of at the forefront of theoretical physical and social anthropology. Being so used to reading science theory that's underpinned by Western imperialism and manifest destiny, this was a breath of fresh air. And the fact that it has made it to us in translation suggests that it is, at least to some extent, state approved, so it's also a fascinating insight into how China wants its past present and possible future to be seen. Perfect escapism for the autumn… 2000 pages of it!
Ant recommends
Trust, Hernan Diaz
Hernan Diaz is officially two for two. His first book In the Distance published by Daunt Books was a revelation. Trust sees Diaz write continue a theme of the foundations of America with similar aplomb and originality that sets him apart from his contemporaries.
Trust leads the reader through a sequence of mirages made up of various versions of the life of Andrew Bevel, a New York business tycoon who rises to glory in the wake of the 1929 crash. The novel’s genius lies in its gradual revealing of the central protagonist — Bevel’s wife Mildred. Mildred has been forced into the shadows of her own life by her husband’s success, a lot of which actually is her doing. Diaz brings Mildred to the fore and in doing so forces the reader to assess the accounts they’ve been told, and fallen for, throughout the book. TRUST has many guises and demonstrates how storytelling can corrupt as well as reveal the truth in family, business and one’s imagination.
The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han, translated by Erik Butler
Just fallen head over heels? Got the capitalist blues? If you want to go deeper into the darkness on your winter commute look no further than The Agony of Eros. Byung-Chul Han analyses the principles of Hagel, Foucault and Barthes as he argues that love has eroded away into the shadows of our society and social interaction. Han discusses ideas around the obsession with health and performance, sex and pornography, science and big data on his quest to demonstrate loves failings in our increasingly demanding world. A thought-provoking pinger!!
Emma recommends
Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Tom Robbins
An assistant commonwealth attorney, encouraged by the policewoman who had driven Sissy home, was pulling strings to have her shipped to reform school. The public defender was using those terms “incorrigible,” “wayward,” “curfew breaker” and “beyond parental control,” that, when applied to a young girl, mean simply “She fucks.”
Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get The Blues loosely follows the roadtrip coming-of-age of Sissy Hankshaw, a girl from the tobacco manufacturing town of Richmond, Virginia, who was born with abnormally large thumbs. Perhaps because of these mutant extremities, Sissy decides that she was born to hitchhike. She finds herself in the Rubber Rose, an all-female ranch owned by a feminine hygiene company that is using the ranch as a spa retreat. Sissy arrives as the cowgirls are in revolt. A perverted fairytale of state-side proportions. Cute as a hot fudge taco and camp as grass. Narrated with affectionate absurdism and voyeuristic abandon. To be read while in motion.
Gob Fauna, Tom Dowse [available in-store only!]
Gob Fauna, a zine by Tom Dowse, consists of 5 short stories on the subject of working in customer service. Hellish fables of horrible bosses, spiteful colleagues and inhabitable work environments come together to create a comically absurd world of self-degradation, contracted torment and unwanted responsibility. ‘Deep Freezer’ sees an overenthusiastic employee rewarded with unpaid overtime to clean the Arctic-tundra-adjacent deep freezer. ‘Pipe (Part I and II)’ follows an art gallery invigilator’s haunting memories of being at the mercy of a labyrinthine installation. These stories are not a fantasy escape but a surreal refraction of the dreary reality of hospitality work. A product of fugue state daydreams tending to insanity while behind the counter or in the kitchen. Designed by P.G. Howlin’, complete with hieroglyphic linocuts. Published by Koroula SF and Studio Operative.
Finger Food Magazine: Issue 1, ed. Barney Pau and Kit Jury Morgan [available in-store only!]
Finger Food is a space for artwork and writing exploring craft, cooking and creation. Articles, poetry, prose, recipes and incredible photography grace the pages of this mag, with topics ranging from family eating rituals to industrial pig slaughter to edible flowers. An attention to ecology, farming and foraging practice and sensory experience can be felt throughout this publication.
]]>Sam recommends…
Either/Or by Elif Batuman
This winter, you’re going to need a laugh. A belly shaker that makes you snort on public transport. Elif Batuman can provide this for you. The Idiot, and the recent sequel, Either/Or follow Selin, a young Turkish American, as she struggles through her first two years in Harvard. They chart Selin’s reaching for, and failing to find, the certainties that we think will shape adulthood, but which never materialise. She documents the tragedy of adolescent earnestness like no one else. Trust me, it’s fucking hilarious.
Maud Martha by Gwendolyn Brooks
Maud Martha is the only novel by the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, and it’s just been re-isseud in a handsome volume by Faber. It’s an absolute gem, a series of vignettes in the life of the eponymous main character, from her childhood to life in an apartment building on the South Side of Chicago. It’s basically a high literary version of the meme: expectation vs reality. It’s a real pleasure to read (the rhythms of the prose really let you know that you’re in the hands of a poet), while also being structurally slyly subversive. It stays with you!
Emma recommends…
The Book of Birmingham: A City in Short Fiction, edited by Kavita Bhanot
'Birmingham is a true city of the future: endlessly becoming, never arriving.'
Birmingham, like any city, is a changing landscape. But, unlike a lot of places, it never seems to reach the point of definition. Its celebration as the site of the Commonwealth Games feels overdue but also entirely insincere. Its importance as a key part in Britain’s industrial history has fallen away as factories have closed to be replaced by shopping malls and car parks. Birmingham is geographically segregated (or ‘separated’, as Bhanot puts it) by race and class through anti-pedestrian junctions and dual carriageways.
Through these ten short stories the reader captures glimpses of disparate pockets across the city, each dealing with its own task of transformation - immigration, political unrest, industrial decline. Featuring writing by Balvinder Banga, Alan Beard, Jendella Benson, Kit de Waal, Sharon Duggal, Joel Lane, Malachi McIntosh, Bobby Nayyar, C.D. Rose & Sibyl Ruth. Published by Comma Press.
Hashish by Oscar A. H. Schmitz, translated by W. C. Bamberger
'Life seemed to stand still in the moment of unfettered discharge. The brimming intoxication suddenly flew out of their souls. Empty - fragile - the disillusioned ones stood there and in their suddenly frozen minds scarcely knew how to pull back the reins of the flown phantom that had presently seemed like life.’
Oscar A. H. Shmitz’s ‘Hashish’, first published in German in 1902, toys with narrative structure as much as it plays with the imagination. The reader is transported to a shadowy, hallucinogenic, slightly queasy and gruesomely thrilling realm of demonic union (naughty!), bored aristocrats (dangerous!), cannibalistic orgy (sexy!) and waking dreams (???) as the unnamed narrator chronicles a drug-addled night in Paris. Stories within stories accompany the narrator’s increasingly bizarre observations, pulling the reader further into the book’s parodically decadent depths.
So recommends…
Pearls from Their Mouth by Pear Nuallak
You want dreamily yearning speculative fiction and incisively immediate critical essays? Look no further than the incendiary talent of Pear Nuallak, as they traverse multiple routes and roots of being in words. Their first collection is exactly that: a true collecting of thoughts, ideas, dreams, desires, insights, insistences, urgencies and pluralities that will leave you feeling gathered along with ‘all the strange, gorgeous sensate forms that experience the world’. From a haircut that changes everything (or nothing) to meetings in dreams to freeing all the waters of London, this is a book you will want to carry around with you, reading bits to your friends as voice notes at 2 am, and finding companionship in rage and hope.
Nettleblack by Nat Reeve
Nettleblack arrives breathlessly, wholly itself, yet also winding down the strange and brilliant bent lanes previously ridden by Sylvia Townsend Warner and Robert Aickman. It’s a gorgeous bicycle basket of a novel wherein there are many things that delight my big gay heart, including bicycles and the divided skirts in which to ride them; ferrets and novelty rat pyjamas; surprising cravats and haircuts; full tilt journalling for justice (and love); scandalous novels; self-naming; swooning; sisters, and running away from – and towards – them; and a cornucopia of true love, of every kind and queerness. A heart tonic in a dark time, Nettleblack will sweep you up unawares and carry you along in its headlong plots and desires, just as the Dallyangle Division does to Henry – and like Henry, you may find that it changes, and even saves, you; or at the very least, makes you ecstatic.
Ant recommends…
The White Hotel by D. M. Thomas
Don't start this book in public! The opening comprises of a wildy sexual and surreal poem about a couple meeting and discovering one another in a white hotel in the mountains, it is one of the most startling openings to any book and sets the tone of a novel that doesn't let up. The second part of the novel deconstructs this dream poem in Freudian psychology and relates it back to the experiences of the main character Lisa Erdman (under the patient symbolism Frau Anna G). The novel then shifts gear into a narrative of Lisa Erdman's life as an opera singer, and ends with the tragedy of her and her son's deportation to the horrors of Babi Yar. A blend of fantasy, historical fiction and psychoanalysis, this novel is plain weird but also a deeply memorable and startling read.
‘Remarkable and original… there is no novel to my knowledge which resembles this in technique or ideas. It stands alone’ Graham Greene 👀
Highly recommend if you want something to mix things up a bit!
After the Sun by Jonas Eika, translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg
Jonas Erika is one of the most exciting new voices in translated fiction. After the Sun is a collection of experimental and beautifully written short stories that touch on sci-fi, the darkness of tourism and yearning for escape from a metropolis existence. In the story ‘Bad Mexican Dog’ a group of beach boys slink between the tourists they serve in a psychedelic portrayal of abuse, bribery and male camaraderie. The writing in this story is exceptionally visual and cinematic, the portrayals of landscape completely unique. Not every story punches on this level, but all the stories attempt to push the boundaries of what the form can do, and for that alone After the Sun is one to grab and dip into!
Dan recommends…
Telluria by Vladimir Sorokin, translated by Max Lawton
One of the pleasures of the increasing availability of Vladimir Sorokin’s fiction in English is the slow and steady unveiling of his literary project. With the release of Telluria (2013), a typically schizoid depiction of a world Balkanized by postmodernity (think Calvino on Krokodil), Sorokin reveals a fictional world first built in his earlier books the Blizzard and Day of the Oprichnik. This, then, is the project: a fantastic, neofascist, crack-addled sci-fi post-Sovietism; the “Vladimir Putin Cinematic Universe”. Its cast, from holy fools to neo-Tsarist boyars, are united by their slavering obsession for the drug Tellurium, which functions as a cipher for fiction itself. Essential reading.
Woodcutters by Thomas Bernard, translated by David McLintock
Thomas Bernhard’s most incisive novel. A skewering of Viennese bourgeois society, framed around a dinner to host a famous actor, Woodcutters deals with typically intense topics: suicide, failure, alcoholism, sexuality. Written as a roman-à-clef, Woodcutters caused outrage at the time of its publication. Not only did Bernhard turn upon his long-time patrons and supporters, the controversy reached the court rooms: Woodcutters is the only book in postwar Austria to be seized from the shelves of bookshops by armed police. Gruelling, hilarious and deeply moving, read this if you want to an exquisite rant about artistic pretensions.
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We thought it would be handy to make a short guide explaining how we programme events at the shop to hopefully answer a lot of the questions that any potential writer or publisher might have.
First thing is, please send all questions or enquiries to events[at]burleyfisherbooks.com
Now, some basic details:
We hold two types of events
Conditions for hire-basis events:
Conditions for programmed events:
Thank you! Hope to see you for an event at the shop soon xox
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And, as ever, 10% off all titles.
The Cellist by Jennifer Atkins *SIGNED*
An extraordinary debut novel published by our very own Peninsula Press is the highlight of the month for us! In limpid and unforgettable prose, this novel asks what love and companionship costs: what happens when you are forced to cast yourself in the distorting light of another person's needs?
The Unfinished Ballad of Sam Amidon by David Mitchell and Sam Amidon *SIGNED*
To continue to blow our own metaphorical trumpet, July sees the release of our first publication from our inhouse mixed-media record label, Lanterne Records. It takes the form of a long conversation between novelist David Mitchell and Sam Amidon about influence and craft. Packed full of insights and god-tier record recs, and beautifully designed by Harry Hepburn, we're very proud to be putting it out!
Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman *SIGNED*
The new novel by Booker-shortlisted Ned Beauman that dramatizes our approaching mass-extinction, and asks whether we have it in us to stop it. Local man of letters Chris Power says 'Ned Beauman captures brilliantly the contradictory blend of urgency, paralysis, panic and resignation the climate emergency and its attendant mass extinctions inspire.'
Dostoevsky in Love : An Intimate Life by Alex Christofi *SIGNED*
Now in paperback, in this biography Christofi uses his novelist's eye to give us a fresh perspective on a familiar subject: Dostoevsky as 'a shy but devoted lover, an empathetic friend of the people, a loyal brother and friend, and a writer able to penetrate to the very depths of the human soul.' Essential for all fans. And we've got signed copies!
Of Saints and Miracles *SIGNED* by Manuel Astur, trans. Claire Wadie
Into this unconventional thriller, Astur weaves fables about the sun and the moon, tales of death and love, and reveals a community and a way of life that may soon be lost. Of Saints and Miracles is a sensuous and poetic portrayal of an outcast’s struggle to survive in a changing world, and a seamless blend of the tragic and the majestic.
Much-loved publisher of translated literature Peirene Press are having a revamp. SUPPORT SUPPORT!
Front Lines by Juliet Jacques
This seminal collection brings together almost 20 years of journalism on art, politics, and culture, by Juliet Jacques, one of the UK’s most pioneering trans writers and great friend of Burley Fisher Books.
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
No one does it quite like her. Cusk's latest novel takes us to an English coastal landscape, where a woman invites a famous artist into her home. But as the summer wears on, the artist's presence starts to unsettle the balance of life in her secluded home. Going on holiday? Grab this, now in paperback.
Dear Senthuran by Akwaeke Emezi
The first non-fiction title by the author of runaway summer hit, Dear Senthuran is a memoir, written in the form of a letter to the author's friends and family (given and chosen). Not to be missed!
Space Invaders and The Twilight Zone by Nona Fernandez, trans. Natasha Wimmer
Two mind-bending, fever dream books by Chilean novelist Nona Fernandez are being issued together in July by Daunt Books, translated by the unbeatable Natasha Wimmer (of 2666 and The Savage Detectives fame). Slight but intense, we recommend bagging both and disquieting yourself in the sun like a good lil goblin.
Air Age Blueprint by K Allado-McDowell
This new release from firm favourite Ignota Press is a manifesto describing how entangled human and non-human intelligence will remake our technologies, identities and deepest beliefs. Allado-McDowell (along with their AI writing partner GPT-3) weaves fiction, memoir, theory and travelogue into an animist cybernetics – an air age blueprint.
Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata, trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori
From the author of Convenience Store Woman comes this debut, out of this world, short story collection. Real opportunity for some armchair travel into the unknown with this one.
Aphasia by Mauro Javier Cárdenas
Now in paperback, this mind-meltingly good novel my Mauro Javier Cardenas is the perfect accompaniment to a few tall beers (if you want to feel even wonkier). Think Joshua Ferris meets David Gates. Anarchic and hilarious.
Brainwashed: A New History of Thought Control by Daniel Pick
The next in the series of books co-published by Profile and the Wellcome Collection is a dive into subliminal messaging, brainwashing and state thought control. Read it now, and be ready for Party Conference season.
The Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton
OK so this isn't exactly new, but this edition (edited by Angus Gowland) is. It's one of the maddest books I've ever encountered. Part commonplace book, part essay collection, part memoir -- it's funny, frustrating and totally beguiling. If you're feeling lacking in inspiration, pick it up and just read a few pages. It's also now in paperback, so if it sends you to sleep at least it won't knock you out when you drop it on your head.
That's all for now folks! Happy reading xx
]]>All Our Yesterdays, Natalia Ginzburg, trans. Angus Davidson
Hello trying to raise a child under the encroaching threat of fascism. A great place to start with the master of mid-century Italian fiction, and a great addition to Daunt's Ginzburg shelf.
Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality, Dr Julia Shaw
Finally proof that unicorns exist! Or actually a winning piece of cultural history that encompasses multiple ways of thinking about and living bisexuality.
Dogs of Summer, Andrea Abreu, trans. Julia Sanches
Shit <3 Isora. But Shit is 9 and Isora is a teenager. Northern Tenerife swelters in the summer, far from tourist beaches & Shit is hot and bothered by her crush on the older girl who doesn't see it. Simmering.
Experience London, Tharik Hussain and Demi Perera
Even jaded Londoners will find hidden surprises & new ways to encounter the city in this great guide.
Feather, Leaf, Bark & Bone, Jackie Morris
Poems written directly on leaves and feathers, with an antique typewriter. Beautiful words celebrating the beauty of the world in the face of grief.
Fight Night, Miriam Toews
Swiv's mom is pregnant, and her grandma is teaching her maths with Amish jigsaws. Three generations of women with fight pull together in Toews' inimitable style.
Immanuel, Matthew McNaught
Winner of the first Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize, this book launches a searing search into faith, organised religion, community, friendship & doubt.
Lapvona, Ottessa Moshfegh
Feral Girl Summer as Moshfegh goes A24 with this medieval horror tale, pivoting on the blind midwife Ina, possessed of second sight. Ofc powerful men hate her. Which way will her ward Marek turn?
The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings, Geoff Dyer
Follow Nadal v. Djokovic w/ this perfect down the line shot from Geoff Dyer. Also serving Nietzsche, Dylan, Coltrane (J.) & Rhys (J.). Illumination from the dying of the light.
Living Pictures, Polina Barskova, trans. Catherine Ciepiela
Leningrad writer uncovers the fragmented archive buried under official history, to uncover voices from the Nazi blockade of the city, ending in a haunting of the Hermitage.
Nettleblack, Nat Reeve
One for all the queers who <3 bicycles, uniforms, journals, romance, markets, crimes, haircuts, bars & finding urself. So… everyone.
Quiet, Victoria Adukwei Bulley
Scattered All Over the Earth, Yoko Tawada, trans. Margaret Mitsutani
Only Yoko Tawada could deliver this cheerfully dystopian novel about Japanese climate refugees finding each other & new words for their experiences.
Speaking Bones, Ken Liu
Finally! An epic and rousing conclusion to the Dandelion Dynasty from one of contemporary fantasy's greats. Everything & everyone is in motion – will it bring peace between the empires?
Still Born, Guadalupe Nettel, trans. Rosalind Harvey
STILL BORN takes on the complexity of having / not having / caring for / wanting children with Nettel's sharp insight.
Thread Ripper, Amalie Smith, trans. Jennifer Russell
Ada Lovelace meets AI weaving & the question of love in climate crisis, in this warp-and-weft novel of creative practice and critical thinking, wrapped up in gorgeous threads.
Tove Jansson, Paul Gravett
The best possible combination: comics genius Paul Gravett on comics genius Tove Jansson, creator of Moomins & more! Part of the Thames & Hudson Illustrator series, celebrating the pictures that make books.
The Visitors, Jessie Jesewska Stevens
There's no place like gnome. C confronts systems collapse, computer code, capitalism & falling for her ex. The code of the novel itself goes rogue…
Yield: The Journal of an Artist, Anne Truitt, introduction by Rachel Kushner
What are the responsibilities & reflections of an artist? Anne Truitt wrote about it for herself for over 30 years & we get to read and learn from her unflinching honesty.
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Plus, two very special hardback treats: signed copies of The Premonitions Bureau + indie exclusives of You Made a Fool out of Death With Your Beauty.
Akwaeke Emezi, You Made a Fool out of Death with Your Beauty
#HotBookSummer. Emezi amazes yet again, this time giving us the romance we dream of, as bereaved artist Feyi leaves New York for the Caribbean with her generous party crush Nasir, only to get her groove back where she least expects.
Sam Knight, The Premonitions Bureau: A True Story *signed*
Mass Observation meets The Men Who Stare at Goats: after John Barker hears in Aberfan about children's dreams that predicted the disaster, he & Peter Fairley set up a bureau for people to submit premonitions. But how many will come true?
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Dhruva Balram, Tara Joshi & Zahed Sultan eds., Haramacy
Eid Mubarak! Revel in these brand-new personal essays from the Middle East, South Asia & the diaspora, appreciating both heritage & adopted home, in the first book project from Haramacy multi-arts festival producer Zahed Sultan.
Yevgenia Belorusets, trans. Eugene Ostashevsky, Lucky Breaks
The ordinary extraordinary lives of the women of Donbass under occupation, from a refugee with a broken umbrella to a witch with a baseball mitt. As its translator says, it's "a book full of nuance, humor, irony, tragedy and, above all, love."
Gwendolyn Brooks, Maud Martha
"like [Brooks'] best-loved poems, this novella is not only the chronicle of one small life, but a mirror reflecting for each reader what shines and shimmers at the edges of his or her everyday existence." Asali Solomon, NPR
Julian Hanshaw, Free Pass
Meet Huck, Nadia and their cutting-edge humanoid sex AI that can morph into anyone with an internet presence. It's a candy-coloured Big Tech love story set against manipulated elections, asking: what does our liberation really mean?
Agustín Fernández Mello, translated by Thomas Bunstead, Nocilla Trilogy
Your faves, together at last. Nocillas Dream, Experience and Lab in one volume. Physicist Mello creates quantum fiction as ideas, narratives and images bombard the reader & each other, setting off small explosions with huge impacts.
Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd, All the Lovers in the Night
Or, the unbearable lightness of being lonely in Tokyo: Fuyuko, a hardworking freelance proofreader speaks to no-one except her editor, focusing her senses on the nighttime lightscape. Catching her reflection in a window changes everything.
Ana Kinsella, Look Here: On the Pleasures of Observing the City
Growing out of her London Review of Looks newsletter, Look Here is Ana Kinsella's summery love song to the stylish semantics of city living, including questions of who gets to live, move & look.
Lieke Marsman, translated by Sophie Collins, The Opposite of a Person
Amid climate crisis, what does love mean? What can a single life encompass – if it is tied to others? Negotiating her tender new relationship to Robin during an internship in Italy, closed-off Ida enters into deep connection with the world.
John Patrick McHugh, Pure Gold
Pure brilliance in this debut short story collection that imagines a small island off the west coast of Ireland, and peoples it with vivid characters whose voices, blazing inside the everyday, will stay in your head for good.
Nina Mingya Powles, Small Bodies of Water
Yes, it's one of our 2021 Books of the Year, a stellar, sensory memoir in a travel-light, read-on-the-shore paperback; or buy two – one to read in the bath – because this is a book you'll want to immerse in and gift to friends.
Gerald Murnane, Last Letter to a Reader
Reliably inventing new ways to write his last book since 1995, Murnane goes meta with this book of essays dedicated to re-reading his own works. A thrilling dip into the archive of/with contemporary lit's most meticulous sentence-server.
Nana Nkweti, Walking on Cowrie Shells
Delicate, dazzling delights await in this debut story collection that reads like a dynamite playlist on shuffle, from a tale shaped by the protagonist's hairstyles via a how-to PR for zombies, to murder, mermaids and comic-con mayhem.
Sarah Perry, Essex Girls
You think you know, but you don't. Essex girl (and occasional serpent) Sarah Perry turns her sharp perceptions on the power and suppression of outspoken, full-bodied, no-bullshit, pleasure-loving women. A gem.
Natasha Soobramanien and Luke Williams, Diego Garcia
An experiment in collaborative writing that offers a model for seeking political truth, justice and restitution, as two dislocated-from-London writers who meet the eponymous poet, named for his mother's home, and together devise solidarity.
Olly Todd, Out for Air
Is it nominative determinism to become a pro skateboarder & genius poet if you're called Olly? Todd combines words and moves to capture sublime states of gravity defiance. Launches at Burley Fisher Weds 11 May, 6.30pm, free!
Rosemary Tonks, The Bloater
The Rosemary Tonks revival continues with this republication of her third novel, a comic opera for the Swinging 60s. Crammed with musicians, singers & sound engineers, the novel's beating heart is its witty, singing, swinging language.
Willy Vlautin, The Night Always Comes
Novelist and songwriter Willy Vlautin (Lean on Pete) tunes his ear to the austerity housing crisis in this thriller on the rental edge, as Lynette does whatever it takes to secure the cash for the house where she lives with her disabled brother.
Kathy Wang, Impostor Syndrome
Fun thriller-lite: Inventing Anna meets Black Widow, as Russian spy Julia Lerner (spinner of software that spies on everyone) quite likes Silicon Valley, thanks, but her #girlboss act creates a gap where junior engineer Alice Lu catches her out.
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Astrid Alben, illustrated by Zigmuns Lapsa, Little Dead Rabbit
Form meets content in this story of a dead rabbit illustrated with die-cut pictures in a lockdown collaboration between two international artists.
Jessica Campbell, Rave
First makeover, first sleepover, first love: Lauren finds everything with Mariah, but will her evangelical family hold her back? Intense experience translates to intense visual storytelling.
Catherine Chidgey, Remote Sympathy
Buchenwald offers an idyllic new life to Frau Hahn. Except for the work camp, which she could ignore – if only her husband wasn't running it. When she meets a prisoner, Dr Weber, she has to question her oblivion.
Maggie Gee, The Red Children
A haunting Ramsgate-set parable about migration and climate change, exploring how communities come together and fall apart around ideas of otherness.
Signe Gjessing, translated by Denise Newman, Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus
Clear, sparkling, concentrated, gorgeous: everything you don't associate with Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy, Signe Gjessing has brought forth and polished with joy.
Lavinia Greenlaw, The Built Moment
How do you hold things together when everything is always falling apart? How do you make something as everything unravels? Lavinia Greenlaw's new collection undertakes this making at the edge.
Ashley Hickson-Lovence, Your Show
Ashley Hickson-Lovence draws on the propulsive second-person poetry of You Are the Ref to shape the story of the UK's first Black senior referee as he blows his whistle on his highest-profile match.
Liam Konemann, The Arena of the Unwell
A headrush of a novel: for everyone who has ever (not) made it to work hungover, or stared longingly at the hottest couple in the bar, or loved a band so hard that your world ended when they broke up. So many feels.
So Mayer and Corinn Columpar, eds. Mothers of Invention: Film, Media and Caregiving Labor
Super-timely essay collection that takes a look at parenting and caring through the lens of film, and vice versa – expect Agnès Varda, Prevenge and Jane the Virgin, along with conversations with filmmakers and artists making (it) work.
Lucy Mercer, Emblem
What does it mean to stand for something? Motherhood sends Lucy Mercer to look at the unique art of the emblem, conjuring layered meaning and irreducible strangeness in these striking poems.
Janelle Monáe, The Memory Librarian, And Other Stories of Dirty Computer
Jane 57821 is back – this time in codex form, but always breaking boundaries. Multi-talent Janelle Monáe expands and explores the world of Dirty Computer in these compelling and liberating tales.
Yara Rodrigues Fowler, there are more things
Melissa and Catarina are friends of many dimensions: sisters in the struggle who share Brazilian heritage and London life, although different histories. Caught up in national and international struggles from 2016, they offer radical possibility.
Edward Shawcross, The Last Emperor of Mexico
A butterfly-obsessed Austrian archduke gets embroiled in a guerrilla war in Mexico, a country he's supposed to be ruling but knows nothing about. What happened next will (not) shock you… A great history of the folly of colonialism.
Ali Smith, Companion piece
With a swift's grace, Ali Smith returns with this story of birds and girls, locks and lockdown, "curlew or curfew," and the strange, necessary friendships between two – well, three; no, four – women in need of stories.
Pajtim Statovci, translated by David Hackston, Bolla
Crossing was a BF fave, and Bolla does not disappoint: an intense love story between a young married Albanian and a Serbian man who meet in Kosovo. No borders can stop passions – or secrets.
Douglas Stuart, Young Mungo
Hold on to your tear ducts, it's Douglas Stuart's follow-up to Shuggie Bain and it's everything: swooningly romantic, tensely threatening. Stuart takes so beautifully seriously the radical power of love to change us & the world.
Preti Taneja, Aftermath
How do you survive the unsurvivable? Preti Taneja's short, stunning book renews the power of language and narration even as she viscerally unpacks their inadequacy in the face of trauma and its systemic causes.
Max Tobias, Rebecca Oliver and Daisy Terry, The Dusty Knuckle
Our local bakery (and social enterprise) want you to have better bread, and special sarnies. Two words: potato sourdough. Get the book, bake yourself happy.
Alice Walker, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker
Wisdom from one of the great writers, with the stories behind the stories, of how her education, activism, intimate life, travels, research and chance encounters shaped her essential novels.
Jessica Yun, The Unofficial Studio Ghibli Cookbook
Yes, it includes Ponyo-style ramen with ham. Plus red bean bao and a ton of other adorable and easy-to-make treats for the full Ghibli-lifestyling experience. Bring some cuteness to your kitchen.
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Kirsty Bell, The Undercurrents
A (true) story of Berlin in which one house acts as a camera or kaleidoscope, bringing into view & mixing together a century or more of history, capturing figures such as Rosa Luxemburg and Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Emily Berry, Unexhausted Time
The dream, right? This is poetry to reaching renew your soul by charting experiences of slippage and loss, "your face striking / me like the time of an appointment I’ve / missed"
Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein, In the Margins: On the Pleasures of Reading and Writing
Want to read (and write) like the divine Elena Ferrante? We can't promise this essay collection can achieve that magical transfusion, but it's certainly a beautiful way to try.
Matthew Green, Shadowlands: A Journey Through Lost Britain
Our fave historian sets out to hear the drowned bells and remembered puffins that echo in Britain's lost places, reminding us our story is more complex and less completist than imperial narratives would have us believe.
John Grindrod, Iconicon: A Journey Around the Landmark Buildings of Contemporary Britain
From Barrett Homes to the Angel of the North, the built landscape of Britain has changed dynamically in the post-war years, and John Grindrod is a great guide to the iconic shapes and silhouettes that populate our shared spaces.
Robert Hewison, Passport to Peckham: Culture and Creativity in a London Village
A joyful study of a century of community, at once local and transnational. In looking at how people live and work, gets into wider implications of policy, policing and planning that limit and frustrate – or inspire creative resistance.
Lauren John Joseph, At Certain Points We Touch
Hotly-anticipated debut novel from playwright, performer and icon Lauren John Joseph – and it's everything you want, a gorgeous, restless story of falling hard, fucking up bad, and the wild emotions of looking back.
Ashley Nelson Levy, Immediate Family
'While I waited, sometimes I thought of you. I thought about how secrets change.' A rush of unguarded second-person narration in the form of an imagined wedding toast to a beloved adopted brother, Immediate Family is a keeper.
Amy Liptrot, The Instant
Or, how to fall in love again with everything – the world, birds, connection, urban life, and each other. The perfect book for this season of re-entry, re-worlding, re-wilding. Hang on to your wings over Berlin!
Madeline Miller, Galatea: A Short Story
Gorgeous gift edition of a story from a modern master, with a new afterword by the author. Miller brings her feminist discernment to the original myth of the living sculpture, plotting a daring escape from her sculptor.
Mark Mordue, Boy on Fire: The Young Nick Cave
We've been blessed by Nick Cave for so long, it can be hard to remember what a wild, unexpected & disruptive force he first was in his 20s, back in 1980. This book brings the awe, the Australianness, and the aftermath of the early years.
Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes, Paradais *SIGNED*
Yes, it's your Hurricane Season fave, back with more scrupulous examinations of the violent racism, classism and sexism of Mexican society, this time focused on two teenage boys unlikelily united across the class divide by fantasies of escape.
Linda Nochlin, edited by Aruna D'Souza, Making It Modern: Essays on the Art of the Now
The OG of feminist art history with her essay "Why Have There Been No Women Artists?," Linda Nochlin was also an exceptional writer on what makes art (and us) modern, in all its unsettling & compelling aspects from nudity to the Vietnam War.
Eloghosa Osunde, Vagabonds!
Welcome to Lagos, the city and its spirits. This is an exhilarating novel constructed like that intricate city, orchestrally layering and connecting voices that rise up in a chorus demanding queer and class liberation. Utterly magical.
Devika Ponnambalam, I Am Not Your Eve
Teha’amana is known to history as the 13-year-old girl sold to artist Paul Gauguin in Tahiti in 1891, and seen in his paintings. This, instead, is her story, an imaginative immersion that lays bare colonialism and offers another world.
Robbie Quinn, Street Unicorns
Street style from New York City and around the world, as photographer Robbie Quinn interviews and captures the beautiful and the brave who inspire us in dark days.
Oscar Riera Ojeda, Fragments: Jewish Cemeteries / in search of lost times
A passion project from photographer Oscar Riera Ojeda, with a foreword by Etgar Keret. Inspired by Marcel Proust, this is a record of ancient cemeteries in Poland, neglected since the removal of their communities, yet still full of history.
Irene Sola, translated by Mara Faye Lethem, When I Sing, Mountains Dance
Poet Irene Solà scatters mushrooms, mountains, memories and not a little witchcraft in her European Union prize-winning novel of a rural Catalan family, in which the world is alive and speaking.
Jack Young, The Council House
Another excellent volume from Hoxton Mini Press, this one a paean to the dream and reality of social housing in all its architectural innovation and lived beauty, tracing London's neglected history of people's places.
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Monica Ali, Love Marriage
Exactly what February needs: a gloriously contemporary romantic nail-biter as two junior doctors race toward their wedding day only for their two families to collide.
Jessica Au, Cold Enough for Snow
Winner of the inaugural Novel Prize, this is an elliptical and peripatetic conversation that takes in one day, one city, one mother-daughter relationship & the whole world.
Mona Awad, All's Well
A Shakespearean tragicomedy in which the inner voice of a theatre director's chronic pain becomes a strange charismatic power as she directs a new production of the play in which she was injured.
Esi Edugyan, Out of the Sun: Essays at the Crossroads of Race
In her second novel Half-Blood Blues, Esi Edugyan wrote across jazz and Nazism; in her third, Washington Black, across science and slavery, visual art and empire. All those investigations come together in these five unfolding essays.
Mariana Enriquez, tr. Megan McDowell, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
Short stories don't come much smokier than this high goth collection. "When you’re writing fiction that wants to disturb and unsettle its readers, breaking the rules can be just as productive as following them." Chris Power, The Guardian
Emma Harding, Friedrichstrasse 19
One building in Berlin, six inhabitants, a century of experience on the frontlines of cultural change, war, division and reunification.
Sheila Heti, Pure Colour
Another genre-defying feat from Sheila Heti, this one deep-diving into first love and middle-aged grief, and the portal that connects these overwhelming experiences.
Mark Hodkinson, No-one Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader
From one prized book on top of the wardrobe in a family that didn't read to 3,500-title "book cave," Mark Hodkinson narrates a life in reading, and the changes to reading and writing in working-class Britain across his lifetime.
Junji Ito, tr. Jocelyne Allen, Deserter: Junji Ito Story Collection
Love horror manga? You'll know Junji Ito, the master of the form. His earlier stories, collected here, find their unusual haunts and scares in relationships, whether familial, romantic or at work.
Grace Lavery, Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis
Gleefully and gloriously spraying parody, pastiche and Adorno like silly string, this fourth wall-licking memoir-cum-everything else does many, many things but this miss never misses.
Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Women: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life
Equal parts cerebral and emotional, this is a group biography of four young women students and friends, including Iris Murdoch, faced with developing a philosophy that could encompass the horrors of WWII.
Leonie Rushforth, Deltas
Moving across moving landscapes, Leonie Rushforth's poems illuminate and irrigate fleeting emotional terrains and shifting sands of thought.
Adam Rutherford, Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics
It would be hard to claim a light history for eugenics, especially seeing it in action right now through racist and ableist pandemic policies – so this is a timely and serious book with a wide sweep.
Defne Suman, tr. Betsy Göksel, The Silence of Scheherazade
Welcome to Smyrna, multicultural, polyglot, multilayered Ottoman trading port. But the Empire is ending, and the city is a battlefield. Four women's lives and stories are caught in the fray: these are their stories.
Helen Thompson, Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century
What if fossil fuels were behind the political shocks of this century? Cambridge Professor of Political Economy Helen Thompson makes a devastating argument about our fuel addiction, its ramifications, and the need for change.
Christos Tsiolkas, 7 1/2
The provocateur is back with a reflexive novel about a writer both on and in retreat, seeking to pursue a Ruskinian novel of Beauty – except his narrator is a former porn actor, a working class Australian, and beauty is never extricable from its contexts.
Elvia Wilk, Oval
Would you take the blue pill? In Oval's future Berlin, where the climate is collapsing but rent is still out of control, it's a pill that makes you more altruistic. Anja, whose boyfriend Louis is developing it, isn't so sure.
Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery
So incendiary it's taken more than 80 years to find a UK publisher: Eric Williams' brilliant and influential study evidences slavery as the rotten heart of British economic progress, remaining a compelling must-read.
]]>To Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara
Everyone's fave delivers massive genius just when we need it most. Speculative fiction at its most heartfelt and brilliant, "executed with enough deftness and lush detail that you just about fall through it, like a knife through layer cake." (Jordan Kisner, The Atlantic).
Olga Dies Dreaming, Xochitl Gonzalez
A hot property already on its way to Hulu in an adaptation by the author, and starring Jesse Williams and Aubrey Plaza, this is a "warm hearted and tough minded" (Kirkus) family drama set in Brooklyn in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers
Finalist for the National Book Awards and Kirkus, Oprah's Book Club Choice, this hotly-anticipated debut by poet Jeffers finally makes it to the UK! Epic, inventive, deeply-felt and absorbing, this multi-generational tale of a Black Southern family is the perfect January read
Wahala, Nikki Smith
Here comes wahala – in the shape of the dazzling, slippery Isobel, who will turn the lives of friends Ronke, Simi and Boo deliciously upside-down… Read it avidly now, get a copy for all your besties, and get ready for the BBC adaptation by Rocks' screenwriter Theresa Ikoko.
How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu
Ambitious novel-in-stories about a near-future of devastating climate crisis and an ancient alien plague melted from the permafrost. Brilliant if bleak comfort, a compelling and eye-opening read, a fractured form for a fractured world.
White on White, Aysegül Savas
Olivia Sudjic calls Savas's debut "Deeply humane, quietly devastating, mesmerisingly beautiful." White on White is a meditation on art, the human figure and the narratives behind the canvas, told in glimpses and gasps.
The Sentence, Louise Erdrich
Tookie – accidental murder accomplice-turned-avid reader and bookseller – is one of the most memorable characters in contemporary literature. As is Flora, the ghost that haunts her and Birchbark Books, (a version of) Erdrich's own Minneapolis bookstore, as the seasons turn through COVID and the US's reckoning after the murder of George Floyd. The perfect bookish book.
Tell Me How to Be, Neel Patel
This "resplendent debut" (Publisher's Weekly) will hit home after the holiday season, as gay songwriter Akash finds himself steeped in secrets, lies and the possibility of truth, when he returns to help his mother pack up his childhood home.
Fuccboi, Sean Thor Conroe
We can't argue with Chris Power, who describes Fuccboi as "a book to argue and laugh with; be appalled and impressed by." What happens when a fuccboi writer gets sick and self-reflective, thinking equally through hip-hop and Wittgenstein? Exhilarating.
Send Nudes, Saba Sams
Shortlisted for The White Review short story prize, Saba Sams delivers a first collection that will smash through your hangover/dry January with ten after-the-party stories that will get your blood pumping & your eyes misting.
Fiona and Jane, Jean Chen Ho
Friendship deep dive! A perfect read-along to send your closest pal, the one who knows you better than you know yourself, as Fiona knows Jane (and vice versa). Told in alternating-voice short stories, this is a perfect picture of being young & being loved and seen.
Eleven-Inch, Michal Witkowski, trans. W. Martin
Meet Dianka and Michal. The Berlin Wall has just fallen and they're on their way from East to West, one john at a time. A wicked satire on neoliberal capitalism, Eleven-Inch is also a Fassbinder-esque love song to the queer hustle in a disillusioned world.
Scary Monsters, Michelle de Kretser
Two novellas, one book: which one will you start with? With Lili, an Australian student/teacher in France in 1980 reading L'Étranger? Or Lyle, a young bureaucrat in near-future Melbourne where Islam is outlawed? Join the dots in this ambitious, unnerving diptych.
Bibliolepsy, Gina Apostol
Gina Apostol's wildly witty debut arrives third of her books in the UK (fittingly, given her love for non-linear narration). It's "a book for those who can be swept away by the graceful and meaningful turn of a phrase, those who love a smart joke" (Luis Joaquin M. Katigbak, Philippine Inquirer).
Pilgrim Bell: Poems, Kaveh Akbar
Yes, Calling a Wolf a Wolf lovers, here's more Kaveh Akbar! Writing the (im)possibility of an ethical spiritual journey under American capitalism, Akbar offers anthemic & intimate verse for the moment.
Wild Imperfections: A Womanist Anthology of Poems, edited by Natalia Molebatsi
As Bernardine Evaristo says, Wild Imperfections "puts Black women where we know we belong, not at the margins of other people’s art … but at the helm of our own creative practice." Featuring poets from Botswana to Brazil, including well-known voices such as Nikki Giovanni and Staceyann Chin.
Homo Irrealis: Essays, André Aciman
In this essay collection, André Aciman calls his central preoccupation by its name: the irrealis mode, an evanescent temporality of possibility in which "every page quivers with a yearning for moments that have long ceased to be. Or perhaps not" (Sukhada Take, The Rumpus).
Abolition. Feminism. Now., Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Erica Meiners, Beth Ritchie
"Attentive to histories of organising that are too quickly erased, and alive to new possibilities for working collectively in the present time, this book is as capacious and demanding as the abolitionist feminism it calls for." Sara Ahmed. The book we need for the organising we're doing.
The Creative Gene, Hideo Kojima
He created Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, and now he's sharing the secrets to his creative drive and practice – you want in, right? An impassioned look at some of the films, books and games that inspired a great.
Worn: A People's History of Clothing, Sofi Thanhauser
Through five fabrics – Linen, Cotton, Silk, Synthetics, Wool – Worn spins its history of workers' rights, climate justice, feminist campaigning, and the long affective story of our relationship with our bodies and their coverings. Engrossing.
White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain's Legacy of Slavery, Thomas Harding
Thomas Harding learned that his mother's family made money from sugar plantations in Guyana: in White Debt he unfolds the history of the uprising that became a key trigger to abolition, and looks hard at the hidden profits of slavery.
Plant-based Burgers: And Other Vegan Recipes for Dogs, Subs, Wings and More, Jackie Kearney
Veganuary but make it burgers. Cut your intake of both meat and delivery with this mouthwatering homemade how-to on creating your own healthy, flavourful, ethical fast food, not just for January but for life!
The Whole Vegetable, Sophie Gordon
Eat shoots and leaves with Sophie Gordon's (South East London Supper Club) thrifty, sustainable guide to the bits of vegetables that don't make it into many other cookbooks. Highly recommend the Apple and Walnut Danish Buns: look good, feel good food.
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Through the bookseller version of Squid Game, Ant, Dan, Enya, Pema, Sam & So have narrowed their year of brilliant reading down to a finely-crafted list of truly excellent titles. Scroll down The List to find Staff Recommendation capsule reviews for each title 💝
All the titles on the list are 10% off (automatic discount at checkout) until Xmas, so buy early and buy often!
Our overall Book of the Year 👑 will be announced 1 December 🎉Follow us on @burleyfisher to find out more…
100 Boyfriends, Brontez Purnell
All The Names Given, Raymond Antrobus
Asylum Road, Olivia Sudjic
Averno, Louise Glück
Bear, Marian Engel
Best Practices, Habib William Kherbek
The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft
C+nto and Othered Poems, Joelle Taylor
Detransition, Baby!, Torrey Peters
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, Chanda Prescod Weinstein
The Eighth Life (For Brilka), Nino Haratischvili, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin
Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, Lola Olufemi
A Ghost in the Throat, Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Keeping the House, Tice Cin
Keisha The Sket, Jade LB
Lairies, Steve Hollyman
A Little Devil in America, Hanif Abdurraqib
The Lost Pianos of Siberia, Sophy Roberts
Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
The Ministry For The Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon
Open Water, Caleb Azumah Nelson
Orwell's Roses, Rebecca Solnit
Other People’s Clothes, Calla Henkel
Piranesi, Susannah Clarke
The Service, Frankie Miren
A Shock, Keith Ridgway
Small Bodies of Water, Nina Mingya Powles
Sorrowland, Rivers Solomon
Tell Me I’m Worthless, Alison Rumfitt
The Things We've Seen, Agustin Fernandez Mallo, translated by Thomas Bunstead
Variations, Juliet Jacques
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, Barbara Comyns
The Yield, Tara June Winch
The Eighth Life (For Brilka), Nino Haratischvili, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin
‘The Eighth Life’ tells the story of a Georgian family’s history that spans the ‘red century’ with romance, grace and immense power. The reader follows the characters through ballrooms, war zones and the hills of Georgia as they orbit and collide with one another’s lives. Haratischvili sets up generation-defining moments with poetic language and deft storytelling that never loses pace. A remarkable read, order one to your door and hunker down!
A Shock, Keith Ridgway
In ‘A Shock’, Ridway’s characters are stitched together in a collective subconscious that is mapped through the walls of shared flats, the shrubbery of front gardens, cycled commutes and mumbled conversations in the musty pubs of a south London neighbourhood. Ridgway returns to themes of surveillance and disappearance, social anxiety, suspicion of the other and the plight of loneliness in an urban existence. He maintains a sharp and witty style that always keeps an eye on wider social issues of race, class and workers’ rights, the balance of which is what makes this novel such a joy. ’A Shock’ is nail on in its analysis of the coping mechanisms a person can be forced to adopt in order to exist in this city, yet it alludes towards the surreal through its skill and imagination. Highly recommended!
A Ghost in the Throat, Doireann Ní Ghríofa
A Ghost in the Throat melds the forms of essay, auto-fiction and scholarly research in poetic prose to create a truly unique book. Doireann Ní Ghríofa makes it her mission to shed light on the life and work of the poet Eibhlín Dubh who has been silenced at the hands of writers, translators and scholars throughout history. In forgotten ruins, drowned forests, libraries and through the challenges of motherhood the author hunts for Eibhlín Dubh’s true voice. In doing so she also finds her own.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia, Sophy Roberts
In her travelogue ‘The Lost Pianos of Siberia’ Sophy Roberts sets out on a journey to find a piano for her friend the Mongolian pianist Odgerel Sampilnorov. On her quest Roberts traces these lost pianos from 1930s jazz jams in Harbin, to prison orchestras touring gulags, identifies the piano in the final home of the Romanovs and is led to the Kuril Islands at the edge of the Siberian provinces. What is so striking about this book is the depth of physical research in one of the most remote places on earth. Roberts’ prose is fully absorbing and her determination unwavering in the face of brutal weather conditions, Russian police interrogation and the depth of family stories that revolve around an instrument that transformed Russia, giving us some of the world's greatest composers and pieces of music – give them a listen on this Spotify playlist.
Best Practices, Habib William Kherbek
The latest novel by Habib William Kherbek is best summarised as a polemical work that examines the failings, malicious undercurrents and potential political disasters of Western intervention in Africa. The novel's central character is the marketing guru and ‘ethical entrepreneur’ Graham Price. After a Richard III style campaign for the Scoliosis Partnership brutally backfires in London, Price takes to African country 'Z' where he befriends arms dealers, sets up photoshoots with Hollywood celebrities and even contacts Z's dictator by ignoring all international code and risking harm to the civilian population. Kherbeks’ crosshairs are always keenly aimed at the previous failings of the British state abroad and the danger of the 'white saviour' in Africa. In 'Best Practices' the reader feels there is no better writer at finding the balance between the farcical and the tragic in the present literary landscape. 'Best Practices' is a true one off not to be missed.
Keeping the House, Tice Cin
Tice Cin’s ‘Keeping the House’ explores the frenetic undercurrents of North London’s neighbourhoods Tottenham and Green Lanes. Somewhere between Portrait of a Turkish Family by Ifran Olga and Caleb Femi’s POOR, Cin’s natural poetry and the unique rhythm of her storytelling weave a spellbinding narrative through several generations of Turkish Cypriot family. Cin reveals the secrets of her native Cypriot language and its culture to the reader as they explore the family homes, parks, fruit stores and back streets of one of London’s most vibrant and fascinating communities — a captivating read from a powerful new voice!
Averno, Louise Glück
In ‘Averno’, Louise Glück examines the gradual weathering of her life lived in love, loss and regret. These poems are a deep insight into the impossibility of understanding and often feel suspended in their own vacuum of space and time, to be plucked, read and given back to the fragility from whence they came. The emotion always lingers with quiet brutality:
The title is taken from the name of a volcanic crater lake near Naples (‘Avernus’ in The Aeneid) that the Romans believed was a portal into the underworld. It is here that Glück peers into the void with the myth of Persephone as a touchstone throughout. A collection of devastating beauty and deep poetic wisdom. ‘Averno’ stays with you and will draw you back to its darkness time and again:
Open Water, Caleb Azumah Nelson
Every so often a book comes out that is so enthralling and beautiful it is difficult to review because it can never do it justice. Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson is one of those books. The ability to express tenderness, to show the calm and intensity of love and grief. A story that feels cinematic, as if every scene is glowing. It is only February but it is already my book of the year. It is a book that is to be shared with others, to be celebrated. A book that says so much about what is unsaid, only understood. My recommendation is: read it. Then read it again.
Detransition, Baby!, Torrey Peters
Detransition, Baby! by Torrey Peters is a story that sucks you in and doesn’t let up. Dark and funny, it’s outlandishness never seems far-fetched and more so focuses on allowing the characters to be flawed and loveable. The story is about Reese (a trans woman), Ames (Reese’s ex and detransitioned from being Amy), Katrina (a Jewish Chinese cis woman) and an unexpected pregnancy. It draws parallels between trans woman and divorced cis women (the books dedication being to divorced women) and their struggles to reestablish their personhood. Refreshingly, the story never tries to equate any struggle with another, only to thread together compassion. Everything is terrible and everything is beautiful. Add it to your summer reading list and enjoy the ride!
Lairies, Steve Hollyman
Lairies is a story told from multiple perspectives, some narrators more trustworthy than others, in the midst of a reckless vigilante pursuit. Some take it upon themselves to punish those they deem worthy of a knock in the jaw or kick in the ribs while others are pulled into the sh*tstorm. I don’t know if I should describe a book like this as “fun” but I had a lot of fun reading it. It’s dark and real in the most earnest way. It’s almost like you can smell copper and stale beer. It’s brilliant!
A Little Devil in America, Hanif Abdurraqib
‘A Little Devil in America’ is an important and just purely amazing book about black performance in America. It contrasts Abdurraqib’s personal perspective with historical accounts, featuring the dust bowl dance marathons, black magicians and Arthena Franklin’s documentary of a performance in the 70s. Abdurraqib is a voice of our time, having already shown he is an incredible writer with his book ‘They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us’ he has somehow outdone himself with this book. History cannot be left behind, it echoes into the future and Abdurraqib is the writer to show it.
Other People’s Clothes, Calla Henkel
Other People’s Clothes by Calla Henkel follows Zoe after the unsolved murder of her best friend Ivy, a ballet dancer with blonde hair and always leading the way. Fed up with art school in New York, she decides Berlin is the place to take a year exchange along with the mysterious and controlling Hailey, a redhead with a passion for tabloids and the Amanda Knox Trial. Zoe struggles with the grief of losing her best friend, readjusting to Berlin and the paranoia that their author landlord is spying on them. Raves, collages, tabloids, cheap booze and expat blues. A story of finding identity in others and creating one's own narrative.
Small Bodies of Water, Nina Mingya Powles
Small Bodies of Water by Nina Mingya Powles (writer of the poetry book Magnolia), would be considered a memoir but instead of a chronicle of events it is a series of observations. The time-line goes back and forth, up and down. One moment cycling through the rain in Shanghai to swimming in Hampstead Heath Women’s pond. Powles is connected to herself not through landmass but through bodies of water, language and nature. Spotting a Kōwhai tree on the streets of London, a tree she thought only grew in New Zealand. Learning to write her name in Mandarin. A warm meal alone in a new city.
The Service, Frankie Miren
The Service by Frankie Miren explores multiple perspectives of modern sex work, one through the eyes of a long-term sex worker, another of someone just starting out and the third being a self-proclaimed feminist who is against it (who I can imagine writing a transphobic thinkpiece under the guise of white-feminism). From the ethics of sex robots to motherhood, the story never gives the reader a definitive answer, you pull your own ideas out of the text. I could hardly put the book down, it gives the same feeling as walking out of the cinema feeling like your perspective is forever changed.
Piranesi, Susannah Clarke
Pensive Piranesi lives practically alone in a big Escher’s castle, tending to it with loving care. He’s a scientist, measuring realities and discovering empirical truths, always from a place of deep curiosity. This book moves very slowly and methodically until the end when everything happens very fast. I don’t want to say anymore, but I just really urge you to read it because it’s definitely my best book of the year and everybody I’ve recc’d it to has loved it also. And I want to point to Susanna Clarke’s acceptance speech for Women’s Prize for Fiction, where Clarke said never thought she’d be well enough to write the book and wanted to share hope with those ‘incapacitated by long illness’ (Clarke has Chronic Fatigue Syndrome). I found that very poignant and personally affecting, so thank you Susanna <3
Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a spooky pageturner about the Doyles, a vampiric colonising dynasty, and their attempts to bring their disturbing ways into the latter half of the 20th century. Elegant and accomplished Noemí Taboada receives a note from her desperate cousin Catalina, who has married into the Doyle family. Struck by the real emotion in Catalina’s letter, Noemi leaves her life of controlled artifice and decadence to interrogate the trouble her cousin has found herself in. She finds herself somewhere she didn’t expect - a horror story rooted in settler-colonialist greed.
The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon
Gotta be honest and say that I have not yet finished this massive book by Andrew Solomon about his relationship and personal history with depression. I think it’s really good though. Andrew is an incredibly confident writer and I’m so impressed with the way he’ll take you on a very big tangent that seems completely irrelevant to the topic and then bring you back 20 minutes later with a big ‘oh!’, because suddenly you understand. Many of the lines I’ve read have really stuck in my head. For example, Solomon says that while taking his antidepressants each morning he has the sense that he is ‘swallowing his own funeral’ – I thought this was really funny. He also says that the reason people write memoirs about depression is because depressed people know that the statistics and metrics scientists and doctors attempt to impose on the illness never make any sense or explain the condition in a real way. Solomon says that with depression ‘the hard numbers are the ones that lie’. This idea keeps bouncing around my head, and I can’t wait to finally finish the book, five years from now, probably.
Bear, Marian Engel
It might feel wrong but I’m here to compel you, you must, must read the sexy bear book. It’s so good, wow, I sat down and read it in two hours. Faster, my fingers turned the pages until I found myself somehow at the end, left with questions, slightly dazed, uncertain about what it all meant. I’m still not sure, there’s a lot to it. More importantly – what does it mean about me? Did I love this book for the same reason I’m into watching YouTube videos about people who move to the woods and build cabins? Is it the smell of the older and more dangerous folk tales that draws me in? Is it because it speaks to the guilt I feel about my love for stinky old books written by louche, velvet-garbed moustachioed creeps? Dunno. I think Patricia Lockwood’s essay about it in the LRB is an interesting companion read tho. Oh! This is a great book to read upstairs in your old bedroom while at Christmas with fam. Afterwards you can stumble down to dinner glassy-eyed and unnerved, unable to relate to the people around you because you’ve just gulped down a book about a librarian who has a transformative sexual relationship with a BEAR.
The Things We've Seen, Agustin Fernandez Mallo, translated by Thomas Bunstead
This is a book of traces. A novel that probes at how, in the 21st century, the field is flooded by the interconnected remnants of our lives and those who came before us.
It takes the form of three novellas, each of which tells a story which is haunted by, but not directly implicated in, one of the major wars of the last century: the Spanish Civil War, WW2 and the Vietnam War.
I could try and summarize what happens, but that would miss the point of why I loved this book. Like Bolaño, or DeLillo in the 80s, Fernandez Mallo dissects the causal links which form the basis of the assumptions under which we live our lives. It's a long time since I read something that so thoroughly rearranged the furniture of my brain. Buyer beware!
Asylum Road, Olivia Sudjic
In her second novel, Olivia Sudjic grapples with the effects of childhood and intergenerational trauma. Anja is a refugee, a survivor of the siege of Sarajevo. It’s an experience that haunts the novel, never directly described, but traced through its effects on Anya’s relationship with her fiance. The novel takes us from London, to Provence, to Cornwall, and eventually back to Sarajevo, where Anya’s mother is suffering from dementia and believes the siege is still underway. In her airless relationship with Luke, there is no escape for the part of Anja that has remained with her mother in this endless siege, and this failure is the beginning of a psychological disintegration which powers the climax of the novel. Wise and exact, Asylum Road is unsparing and unmissable.
All The Names Given, Raymond Antrobus
In this follow-up collection to the Folio award-winning The Perseverance, Antrobus continues to explore the themes that threaded his first collection – sound and language, place and loss – but does so in a register that feels less raw and somehow more reconciled. He wrestles with the limits of love over distance and time (both his parents’ and his own) and gives the relationship of his partial deafness to his work a greater sense of embeddedness, dotting the collection with ‘caption poems’. Having dispensed with some of his anger, he has lost none of his compassion. All The Names Given is a mature and lyrically complex second collection from one of British poetry’s greatest talents.
100 Boyfriends, Brontez Purnell
This breakout and runaway hit from the hottest new indie on the block, Cipher Press, is a rolicking and rutting collection of stories about gay desire. Purnell’s characters seduce their colleagues’ partners and solicit sex on their lunch breaks. It is a filthy, foulmouthed and absolutely hilarious celebration of gay sex in all its forms (the story about the Satanist Warlock encounter is particularly memorable). At times unexpectedly abrupt and brutal, as characters fight self-sabotaging tendencies, these stories are just as often unexpectedly tender.
Keisha The Sket, Jade LB
Published in book form for the first time, Keisha The Sket is a text that started life as a text shared by bluetooth and over email, a viral phenomenon from the MSN age and a time capsule of the txt language that defined the time. It follows Keisha, a young teen, through her first sexual experiences, and encounters with violence in her ends. It is explosive, funny, lurid and at times disturbing (as any snapshot from the mind of a 13-year old would be), but it is a sheer joy to read because of this filterlessness.
It is given here in its original form, and in a modernised English version, alongside an introduction from the author about her changing relationship (shame and eventual reconciliation) to Keisha. There are also excellent contextualising essays from Candice Carty-Williams, Caleb Femi, Aniefiok Ekpoudom and Enny on how formative Keisha was to their own writing, and how important it has remained as a document of young, black, female sexuality. If you pick this book up, you won’t put it down til it's done. And when it’s done, you won’t forget it.
Orwell's Roses, Rebecca Solnit
There have been a hundred George Orwell biographies, as Solnit readily admits at the start. But this isn’t really a book about Orwell, at least not the Orwell that we know. It starts as a quest to find two fruit trees that Orwell planted in the 30s, and diverges from there to topics that have pervaded the writings of both the author and her subject: ecology and the economy, community and the domestic, geological and ancestral time. In Solnit’s rendering we find an Orwell that we don’t recognise, but perhaps feel closer to for being cast in the light of Solnit’s own preoccupations. Her digressions don’t always come off, but they are always a pleasure to read. One to curl up with this winter, once the roses have gone over.
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, Barbara Comyns
I was totally gripped and utterly charmed by this parable of bucolic village life gone awry. Set during the 30s (and first published in the 50s) we follow the genteel, but down at heel Willoweed family, as they prance around their eccentric estate. But when the miller goes mad and drowns himself, and then – the following day – the butcher slits his throat, their parochial life slides into disorder.
One of the greatest bullying matriarchs in fiction, as well as one of the most memorable opening scenes (ducks floating in the drawing room) make this beguilingly strange and wickedly funny tale of country life the perfect escape from February drabness. I read it in two sittings and am now a confirmed Comyns convert.
The Ministry For The Future, Kim Stanley Robinson
Kim Stanley Robinson has a reputation for being the great utopian of American science fiction. The vivid and shocking sequence that opens his new book, Ministry For The Future, would seem to suggest that he has lost some hope. A horrific heat wave scorches India, killing many millions. The book follows one of the survivors, a young American, as well as the head of a new climate organisation (named in the title) set up by the UN in response and whole host of other scientists, engineers and activists, as they confront the next few decades of accelerating climate change. It is a book absolutely stuffed with ideas – of how things could go further wrong, and how they might be set right. Stanley Robinson has still got the eye of the needle in sight, and the thread between his teeth. Read this, and take up the slack!
The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft
Nearly 900 pages, numbered in reverse, counting down to the Messiah. This utterly magnificent novel abounds with things not usually found in contemporary European fiction: Kabbalistic significance, edible spells, interventionist angels, portentous co-incidences, erotic prayers and divine insight (where God is occasionally an oyster) – intertwined with violent anti-semitism, feudal brutality and a palpable sense of growing threat and historical dread.
Only Olga Tokarczuk could have written this visionary epic of the C18th Polish borderlands, a War and Peace where the war is within the human soul, and there’s no peace in its searching, driven, angry, bitterly satirical and melancholically beautiful account of the oppression of the various, mobile, canny, factional and very much alive Jewish communities of Poland, Moldova and the Ottoman Empire. Hats off as well to Jennifer Croft for superb handling of a dazzling array of voices – from pretentious bishops through crafty survivors to undead grandmas – that range through obscure Church vocabularies, vibrant vernaculars and mystical secrets.
Sorrowland, Rivers Solomon
Vern flees Cainland, but will Cainland ever leave her? As she births and raises her twins alone in the forest, she starts to realise that she’s no ordinary teenager, and that the separatist Black compound where she grew up is more than she imagined – and that has consequences for her children too. Friend or foe, lover or monster: Vern has to read everyone she encounters, and the contradictory information they impart about Cainland and the world beyond it, if she and her kids are to survive. And when she finds someone that she can trust, someone who believes her, will she be able to drop her defences long enough so they can stand together? Full-on, pulse-pounding genre excellence meets writing of the highest order in Rivers Solomons’ third novel. Faer thrilling vision of Vern, a superpowered queer Black mother, pays homage to greats such as Octavia Butler, and creates something also entirely of faer own and of this moment.
C+nto and Othered Poems, Joelle Taylor
Sexy, furious, loving, dancing, wild, hankie-coded butch poems from genius Joelle Taylor – read the book, get ready for the live musical. Cunto is a social history of underground queer nights and riots, resounding with the words and wounds of working-class dykes. It’s a love song to a whole community, a shimmering, leather-clad, Zippo-flicking absolute paean. One to whisper, sing and shout in the sheets – and in the streets.
Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, Lola Olufemi
Reading Experiments in Imagining Otherwise is like sharing a glimpse of your most brilliant, generous friend and comrade’s notebook as she traces conversations in meetings, woven with paragraphs from unwritten essays, poems, erasures, short stories, offerings, ways forward, gifts. Writing of the moment in the moment and so full of pasts and futures because of that. Not so much a manifesto as a making-manifest. The circle on the cover is perfect: this is an open text, one that asks you to jump in the middle, make connections, and live its truths about organising by imagining, and vice versa. Olufemi is one of the most exciting writers in the UK today, and this book is a blessing.
Variations, Juliet Jacques
Variations is pretty various: short stories, yes, but thematically linked by trans lives in Britain, told in chronological order from the mid-1850s to the present; fiction, but drawing on archival research, with each story presented as a different kind of (invented) document, from letters to diaries to film scripts to academic presentations; and a little bit of the variety show, with stories that highlight marginal performance spaces, from the freak show to the punk and performance art undergrounds via arthouse cinema and – yes – an amazing drag bar, as spaces where trans and queer people could increasingly thrive (and sometimes disagree) together.
Leaning towards humour rather than trauma, Jacques’ mordant, sometimes mischievous stories rewrite the twentieth century as an unfolding of gender complexity and trans community, one made by people telling their stories at every scale: intimately to each other; in letters to the press, over megaphones at protests, via blogs, and in creative works. It turns the short story collection into a collective, and it’s a joy to feel part of it as you read.
Tell Me I’m Worthless, Alison Rumfitt
A haunted house novel that makes the very excellent point that hello, Britain is a haunted house, and that the final girl has become the pin-up for misogynist and transphobic fantasies. Also the excellent point that Morrissey is a fucking monster. Tell Me I’m Worthless shows up white supremacy, ‘gender-critical’ feminism, anti-semitism, imperialism, capitalism and other deeply British fascist values as the funhouse mirrors that they are, distorting our relationships to ourselves, each other and histories – and it does it through a cracking, edge-of-your-seat chiller and a compelling love(hate)(love) story. Beware: Rumfitt pulls no punches when it comes to how fascism tortures. This is high-wire writing and a unique reading experience.
The Yield, Tara June Winch
A dictionary, a history, an elegy, an exorcism, a manual for recovery from abuse, both individual and ecological: The Yield can be read over and over for all its many layers. It’s the story of one woman’s homecoming that lays bare all the complex meanings and memories of home, especially for a First Nations woman in a settler state. Documenting the intimacies of colonial violation, it replies by rebuilding body, family, language and love through an auntie-led car trip, a feast, a protest, and a haunting reconnection. This is a book of ghosts asking you to listen.
The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred, Chanda Prescod Weinstein
Mindblowing in multiple directions – awesome explorations of quantum physics combined with a devastating exposé of the racist and sexist frameworks in which science continues to operate, and to perpetuate. This is the science (and history) education I wish I’d had in school – inspiring and inviting, rigorous and nuanced, and always conscious of context as well as the cosmos.
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The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Artworld, Kuba Szreder
Feeling this one… A combination of essays and practical advice for managing and resisting the art world in solidarity with other precarious workers.
Aftermath, Preti Taneja
Stunning, care-ful, committed & urgent investigation of the language of trauma, terror and atrocity from the eye of the storm. One to sit with, return to, share.
Altered States, edited by Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers
Another revelatory gate into the otherwise from Ignota Books, featuring poems for transformation & mind expansion, including many BF faves like Rachael Allen, Bhanu Kapil, Irenosen Okojie, Nisha Ramayya & Yasmine Seale.
Amnion, Stephanie Sy-Quia
Here comes AMNION to blow your head open. A long poem, a refusal of 'but where are you really from?' with what you do with those stories & revelations in its stead.
The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe in Contemporary Culture, Mark Bould
Lots of contemporary texts say they're *about* climate crisis – what about where it bubbles up across a whole range of texts that think they aren't? Mark Bould uncovers.
The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft
Messiahs, angels, prayers, erotic rituals, border-crossings, self-righteous clergy, populist myths: The Books of Jacob has it all & tells it as we need to hear right now, in a dazzlingly capacious translation from Jennifer Croft.
A Cheesemonger's Compendium of British and Irish Cheeses, Ned Palmer
Sometimes you just need cheese. And a book about cheese. A beautifully-illustrated book about cheese, full of great cheese stories. Thankfully, this is that book.
Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders
Whizzing, fizzing, gutsy, super-smart sci fi shorts from a genius. Reading Charlie Jane Anders always feels like hanging out with that cool older friend who shows you LIFE.
The Fell, Sarah Moss
A shivery, foggy tale for long nights. No spoilers needed because you already know you're going to read this in one sitting. Then not sleep.
Good Choices, Bonny Brooks
Good Choices? You know, like getting married… not getting married… reliving old chaotic ways (but fun?)… running away… Above all: telling the story smartly & at novelette-length for Open Pen.
Here is Where, Morgan Omotoye
It's about love. And fighting for what you love. Cue explosions, internal and external. It's the perfect book at the perfect length.
The Impostor & Other Stories, Silvina Ocampo, translated by Daniel Balderston
This beautiful collected Silvina Ocampo expands your Women In Translation. And your surrealist fiction shelf. And your international masters of the short story shelf.
Oh, To Be a Painter!, Virginia Woolf
Pocket-sized treat for Virginia Woolf and art writing fans. Short essays on visual arts, perfect for reading when you stop for a coffee during a long walk.
Peaces, Helen Oyeyemi
Strangers? On a train? Helen Oyeyemi's latest is full of mystery without the murder, a magical journey into one couple's past.
Pity the Beast, Robin McLean
An unflinching account of a brutal culture: one brave & brutalised woman's take-down of the myth of the American west.
Poetry and Bondage: A History and Theory of Lyric Constraint, Andrea Brady [no discount]
A decade in the making, an extraordinary, eye-opening and resounding history of Anglophone poetry and its relation to slavery.
Replace Me, Amber Husain
Working in publishing, Amber Husain comes up against the idea she's replaceable – and asks: can we recognise solidarity while pushing back against substitutability?
Scintillas: New Maltese Writing 1, eds. Jen Calleja and Kat Storace
Merħba Praspar Press, welcoming global Maltese writers onto the UK lit scene with their first book Scintillas, featuring Clare Azzopardi, Peter Scalpello, Loranne Vella & a fantastic mix of fiction, non-fiction & poetry
Somebody Loves You, Mona Arshi
Writing into & out of silence, Mona Arshi's fiction debut has a lyric poet's intensity of observation & compassion. A tender companion.
Unreal Sex, edited by So Mayer and Adam Zmith
Need more queer sci fi/fantasy/horror erotica in your life? YES, yes you do. And Unreal Sex delivers: 10 wildly different & yet intermingling stories of cosmic comings-together.
what will it take for me to leave, Loranne Vella, translated by Kat Storace
Stories like locked room mysteries, flights of fiction racing to their deeply satisfying, often strange denouements.
]]>For BFDay21, our 5 1/2th birthday indie lit fest, we decided to try #YourNextBook LIVE. And it rocked – entirely due to our phenomenal panel from Brixton Review of Books, celebrating the launch of their autumn 2021 issue: Catherine Taylor chaired three of this issue's contributors to hear what our audience had been reading and make recommendations for what to read next. To follow how it unfolded live, catch up with our Twitter thread from the event…
#BFDay21 with @BrixtonBooks! Launching the autumn issue with recommendations for #YourNextBook from @KatyaTaylor @niewview @LaurenElkin @yazzarf 💓 pic.twitter.com/KZUR8GPeD5
— Burley Fisher Books (@BurleyFisher) October 15, 2021
Don't forget that you can find copies of Brixton Review of Books in-store! And you can order all the titles below by clicking the links.
What's #YourNextBook if you loved but couldn't finish Middlemarch…
[Burley Fisher recommends Open Pen's novelettes as a palate cleanser & revitalisation via fiction of the perfect length! Includes novelettes by our BFDay21 showcase panellists Bonny Brooks, Sarah Manvel and Morgan Omotoye, and chair Fernando Sdrigotti.]
#YourNextBook panel recommends:
Silas Marner or The Mill on the Floss as alternate George Eliot novels to attempt; or try the short stories – also about love and disappointment – in Duanwad Pimwana's Arid Dreams, translated by Mui Poopokasaeul
What's #YourNextBook if you didn't love Jonathan Coe's Middle England but did love his previous books?
Go back to Jonathan Coe's Number 11 and his first novel What a Carve Up!. For satire from further afield, the panel recommended:
Oldladyvoice, Elisa Victoria, translated by Charlotte Whittle
The Hungry and the Fat, Timur Vermes, translated by Jamie Bulloch
Under the Frog, Tibor Fischer
Death and the Penguin, Andrey Kurkov, translated by George Bird
The Sun on My Head, Giovanni Martin, translated by Julia Sanchez
What's #YourNextBook if you loved the playful, serious hybridity of The Things We've Seen, Agustín Fernándes Mallo, translated by Thomas Bunstead?
The Luminous Novel, Mario Livrero, trans Anne McDermott
Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, Lola Olufemi (order directly from Hajar Press)
Talking to Ourselves, Andrés Neuman, translated by Nick Caistor and Lorenza Garcia
What's #YourNextBook if you were compelled by the courage and clarity of Ahmet Altan's I Will Never See the World Again: The Memoir of an Imprisoned Writer, translated by Yasemin Çongar
Aftermath, Preti Taneja
Lecture, Mary Cappello (not available in the UK)
Syria Speaks: Art and Culture from the Frontline, edited by Malu Halasa, Nawara Mahfoud, and Zaher Omareen
Manaschi, Hamid Ismailov
What's #YourNextBook if you were roused and transformed by Gioconda Belli's revolutionary memoir, The Country Under My Skin? [email us to special order]
Slash and Burn, Claudia Hernandez trans Julia Sanchez
Milkman, Anna Burns
Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg, translated by Jenny McPhee
What's #YourNextBook by a British author that should be translated into another language?
Dark Neighbourhood, Vanessa Onwuemezi
Keeping the House, Tice Cin
All the Names Given, Raymond Antrobus
C+nto and Othered Poems, Joelle Taylor
Feminism, Interrupted, Lola Olufemi
We That Are Young, Preti Taneja
Swallowing Geography, Deborah Levy
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Josh Cohen, Losers (signed)
A small word that's come a long way between Beck's 1993 single and Donald Trump's obsessive use. Josh Cohen thinks about why we should be more Beck.
Sarah Hall, Burntcoat (signed)
Only Sarah Hall could pull off a lockdown novel: her books always shimmer with things bursting out of containment, and Burntcoat, an artist’s passionate story, is no different.
Frankie Miren, The Service (signed)
Stunning debut fiction that tells it how it is, as sex workers face a legal crackdown that risk their livelihoods and lives. Powerful, subtle and necessary.
Vanessa Onwuemezi, Dark Neighbourhood (signed)
Serving sure-footed, deeply unsettling surrealness, Vanessa Onwuemezi revitalises the short story as a source of sensory and super-smart surprise.
Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I'm Worthless (signed)
The House screams DANGER, but the girls dare. The House has a history, and so do the friends. Will they have a future? The House always wins.
Ruby Tandoh, Cook As You Are (signed)
A gorgeous cookbook for everyone & every kitchen, with delicious and easy recipes for everything up to ice cream, plus those nights when mashed potato is all you are. I mean, want to eat.
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Dodie Bellamy, The Letters of Mina Harker
Perfect Hallowe’en reading for us postmodern queer feminists. If you love Kathy Acker and Chris Kraus, you are going to adore Dodie Bellamy and her 1998 take on/take-down of Big Daddy Dracula, in a wicked new edition.
Dominic Bradbury, Atlas of Mid-Century Modern Houses
Sick of your own four walls? Vicarious architectural tourism to die for in this lavish and global survey of the movement that made Mad Men look amazing.
Pauline Campbell, Rice & Peas and Fish & Chips
Crucial and searing memoir taking on racism and inequality, as Pauline Campbell offers observations from a lifetime seeing immigrants live their lives even as they’re used for political gain in Britain.
Buchi Emecheta, Second-Class Citizen
Richly deserved Modern Classics edition of this crucial novel by the “godmother of Black British writing,” which sees the fearless Adah fighting to keep her dreams and power alive after moving to London, where injustices keep coming.
Bernardine Evaristo, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up
Writer, teacher, professor, mentor, editor, activist, Booker Prize winner: Bernardine Evaristo has changed British literature and publishing, and in Manifesto she blesses us by telling us how and why.
Percival Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
Another metaphysical blast on masculinity, memory, the body & the imagination, as an ageing father writes the novel he imagines his son might write – or is the son imagining what his father might write?
Jonathan Franzen, Crossroads
Franzen goes Ice Storm x East of Eden x Ken Kesey in this truly epic family story of the 1970s and their winds of change. Hold on to your berets/love beads, you’re about to be blown away.
Alan Garner, Treacle Walker
MORE ALAN GARNER, garnering alanly. What more do you need to know? Myth-fiction fusion, stunning writing and a story of healing among what others discard. Treasure it.
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity
No-one but the late David Graeber could have pulled off this visionary intellectual feat, overturning dominant EuroWestern theories of agriculture and capital to reconceptualise human history.
Siya Kolisi, Rise
The phenomenal story of and by the first Black man to captain the Springboks. Whether you love rugby or know nothing about it, this is an epic tale of South African history and individual excellence.
Kwon Yeo-Sun, Lemon, translated by Janet Hong
Crime writing of the highest order as a cold case – the murder of a beautiful teenage girl – gets reopened, reopening old wounds both personal and social in the process.
Jade LB, Keisha the Sket
Whether you have every original post saved to bookmarks, or you’re coming fresh to Keisha, you’ll want to snap up this definitive print edition with essays from Candice Carty-Williams, Caleb Femi, Aniefiok Ekpoudom and Enny.
John le Carré, Silverview
The one we’ve all been waiting for: John Le Carré’s last completed novel, and it’s only about an independent bookstore. Or is it? Espionage and treason among the shelves is very much our jam.
Graham Macrae Burnett, Case Study
Fiction? Non-fiction? What is character? That’s the subject of this brilliant meta-thriller that takes up a young woman’s investigative quest to prove a charismatic psychiatrist pushed her sister to suicide.
Lucie McKnight Hardy, Dead Relatives and Other Stories
Perfect for chilly nights drawing in, definitely one to read under the covers… if you want to be awake, haunted, all night. Lucy McKnight Hardy’s intimate uncanny stories get under your skin.
Courttia Newland, Cosmogramma
Courttia Newland is *on fire*, following up the brilliant A River Called Time with this stunning collection of speculative fiction short stories that imagine alternate futures as lived by the African diaspora.
Sang Young Park, Love in the Big City, translated by Anton Hur
Go Tinder dating in Seoul with Young, a student caring for his sick mother, knocking back soju with his friend Jaehee, and facing the ultimate choice: super-hot-but-super-cold guy vs. potential love of his life.
Gianni Rodari, Telling Stories Wrong, illustrated by Beatrice Alemagna
Yes, it's another fabulous title in translation from everyone's fave Italian Marxist children's author, with gorgeous new illustrations by Beatrice Alemagna. What happens when Grandpa changes the story?
Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's Roses
One great leftist remembers another – via his gardening. George Orwell's roses lead Solnit across continents and biographies, from Stalin to Tina Modotti, to understand how his writing and politics were rooted in growing.
Ursula Scavenius, The Dolls, translated by Jennifer Russell
Four stories, four weird worlds in which siblings predominate, and those closest to us are unknowable; the fourth story takes on Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, as siblings, each with their own story, carry their late mother to Hungary.
Stanley Tucci, Taste: My Life Through Food
Everyone’s secret treat this month is going to be reading this memoir by actor, food traveller and internet Negroni maven Stanley Tucci. Like a perfect Negroni, it's stylish, rich, and sweet with a kick.
Birgit Weyhe, Madgermanes, translated by Katy Derbyshire
Stunning use of the hybrid and plural format of the graphic novel to tell the stories (based on interviews) of Mozambican workers in the GDR who were abandoned when the wall fell. History in every line.
Sammy Wright, Fit
Winner of the Northern Book Prize, Sammy Wright’s debut is an essential read for the contemporary moment, and also reminiscent of the great Andrea Dunbar and Shelagh Delany, a story of class, fashion, hope & what shapes us.
Lea Ypi, Free: Coming of Age at the End of History
What was it like growing up in Albania as Communism fell? This book answers all your questions and more, in a mesmerising essay on generational change and swimming the tides of history.
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Fitzcarraldo is an independent publisher specialising in contemporary fiction and long-form essays. Founded in 2014, it focuses on ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language. The series, designed by Ray O’Meara, are published as paperback originals with French flaps, using a custom serif typeface (called Fitzcarraldo).
Editor Tamara Sampey-Jawad joined us to talk about published Nobel laureates, expanding the British literary imagination, and that now-classic O’Meara design. Follow and show your love to 🐦 @FitzcarraldoEds 📸 @fizcarraldoeditions.
It’s hard to believe that Fitzcarraldo has only being going since 2014 – it feels like such a crucial part of UK literary publishing! You’ve packed a lot in to those seven years, including publishing two Nobel laureates in translation, Svetlana Alexievitch and (BF fave) Olga Tokarczuk, as well as running two prizes (for novels and essays), and running in tandem with The White Review, all at top quality all the time. How on earth do you do it???
That’s very kind of you to say – we do our best! We’ve been lucky with prizes, as you mention, which has allowed us to grow steadily and develop new projects, from producing our own audiobooks, which we started doing last year, to expanding the prizes and increasing the number of books we publish a year – though there is always more that we’d like to do.
Tell us a bit about the prizes, which constitute an unusual approach to making space for new voices in literature. How were they initially conceived, and how have you seen them develop over the years? What’s the process like? And why do you think this approach works so well?
We set up our essay prize first, in 2016, which is for unpublished writers, and then in 2018 launched our novel prize, which is open to published and unpublished authors. Initially this was only to residents of the UK & Ireland but in 2020 the novel prize went global, so to speak, and we teamed up with New Directions in the US and Giramondo in Australia, opening up entries to books written in English from writers all over the world. We’ve published a number of debuts in English and the essay prize has been instrumental in our ability to discover new voices, but the novel prize has also allowed to find writers who’ve perhaps had a gap in their career, for whatever reason, such as Jeremy Cooper, who won our inaugural prize (when we ran it alone) with the achingly beautiful Ash before Oak, and we’ve since published another novel by him too (Bolt from the Blue). The prizes are an important part of our programme and they’ve allowed us to find exciting authors for the English language side of our publishing whom we might not encounter through the more traditional publishing avenues.
You have a very eclectic, transnational list that often features books that transcend established genres: how would you explain to a reader new to the press what Fitzcarraldo publishes? And where would you suggest they begin?
We focus on publishing ambitious, imaginative and innovative writing, both in translation and in the English language. We have two ‘strands’, the fiction series (the blue covers) and the essay series (the white covers), and we try to maintain a balance between all these categories, so our list is more-or-less evenly split between books in English and in translation, and between fiction and essays – though because we publish books that are ambitious in form the latter isn’t always an obvious distinction! For example, Maria Stepanova’s kaleidoscopic In Memory of Memory (translated by Sasha Dugdale), which dips into essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents to tell the story of an ordinary Russian-Jewish family – her own – over the course of the twentieth century. Joshua Cohen looks at another Jewish family, this time a more prominent one, in his latest novel, The Netanyahus: An Account of A Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family. Blending fiction with non-fiction, the campus novel with the lecture, it’s a novel of ideas that is as riotously funny as it is keenly sobering.
You publish translation alongside writing that originates in English, in both fiction and non-fiction (and sometimes books that play with all of the above, like Gina Apostol's Insurrecto): why is it important (for you; in general) to keep the transnational community of writing alive in this way? And what are some of the challenges to doing so in the UK?
Translation has historically been rather lacking in anglophone publishing. That is slowly changing, and prizes like the International Booker – which rewards the translator and writer equally – are helping to raise the profile of translated literature. I think a perception of difficulty, amongst other things, has hindered it from taking up a more substantial position but I don’t really understand the need to set translated literature apart from English-language works.
It sounds trite, but I think letting the books speak from themselves rather than enforcing hierarchies or perpetuating hackneyed tropes (an issue that also extends to how books by women or writers from marginalised communities are marketed, for example) helps to break down the boundaries and biases that limit literary consumption. Aside from the political value in reading outside of your cultural landscape, it also seems to me an anaemic way of enjoying books, which misses out on all the great literature, past and present, from other languages.
Upcoming titles include Dorothy Tse’s first novel Owlish (translated by Natascha Bruce), Fitzcarraldo’s first Chinese-language acquisition, and Alaa Abd-el Fattah’s essay collection You Have Not Been Defeated (translated by a collective), which is your second Arabic-language acquisition after Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail (translated by Elizabeth Jacquette). Literature from non-European languages is less frequently translated in the UK: does Fitzcarraldo have plans to continue broadening its transnational community?
Yes, we certainly want to continue to broaden our list and both Owlish and You Have Not Been Defeated represent exciting new avenues for us. And in fact we have another Arabic-language book on the way – Bushra al-Maqtari’s What Have You Left Behind?, translated by Sawad Hussain, a heartbreaking mosaic of testimonies from the victims of the civil war in Yemen, in the style of Svetlana Alexievich.
Am I right in thinking that Vaness Onwuemezi’s collection Dark Neighbourhood is the first collection of short stories that you’ve published since Jon Fosse’s Scenes from a Childhood? It joins collections by Camilla Grudova, Claire-Louise Bennett and John Keene on your list. What makes a good collection of short stories – and why is it important to keep the form alive?
Actually, the last collection we published was Dark Satellites by Clemens Meyer (it seems we have a thing for story collections with ‘Dark’ in the title!), translated by Katy Derbyshire, but before that was Fosse’s Scenes from a Childhood, translated by Damion Searls. For me, a good short story collection is one that has an overarching mood or style that unites the stories – each of them distinctive and complete but speaking to one another in a way that creates a cohesive whole. What makes short stories special (in my opinion) is their economy and concision – what’s left out can be as important as what’s kept in – and I think form and voice can be pushed in interesting directions, directions that are sometimes harder to sustain over the course of a novel, for example. A literary landscape without short stories would feel flat to me, and though there is often talk of the popularity of short stories waning, I think there is still plenty of appetite for them.
Writing in the Financial Times, Baya Simons, pointing to the ways in which Onwuemezi dynamically unsettles language, form and setting, locates Dark Neighbourhood “in the tradition of surrealist, nihilistic writers such as Julio Cortázar, Jorge Luis Borges, Silvina Ocampo and Samanta Schweblin.” That’s a pretty hardcore list for a debut collection (and as Simons says, it’s Onwuemezi’s rightful place)! How do her stories work their magic?
There is a destabilizing quality to Vanessa’s work – certainly in terms of setting, which can be quite surreal in some of the stories, but particularly in form and language – that makes her such a distinctive and exciting writer. There is a focus on rhythm and the musicality of language that makes reading her a dazzling and enthralling experience. And while there is an element of nihilism, there’s also a wry humour and a playfulness that makes her work feel deeply alive. The book’s epigraph (‘Night is also a sun’) comes from Nietzsche but I’m also reminded of another quote of Nietzsche’s when reading the collection – ‘we can destroy only as creators’ – and I think it’s the electric hum of creative possibility that makes these stories so beguiling.
You’ve published a few debuts by UK-based authors in the last few years – including Vanessa Onwuemezi and Alice Hattrick this year. How does Fitzcarraldo work to make space for them as the available critical space in broadsheet and mainstream media narrows? How do you get these fresh voices to readers? And where do you see new and emerging UK literature heading now and next?
While critical coverage in broadsheet and mainstream media is narrowing – and that is something that I do find concerning – the relationship we’re able to establish with readers directly through social media does help to counteract that in some way, and seeing their responses to the books is always galvanising. We’ve also been lucky to have the support of wonderful bookshops – like Burley Fisher! – and we try to put on as many events as is possible.
I think the uniformity of design across our list is also something that benefits us. I suppose the idea is that if you’ve read one of our books before and liked it, then you’ll be more likely to pick up another and that’s something I think that helps us to bring fresh voices – whether they’re debut writers or writers who don’t have a profile here in the UK – to new readers. I think that sense of curation that small presses provide – and I appreciate that I am a little biased – is helping to invigorate the landscape and shows that there are readers for books that do new and interesting things.
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What we experience shimmers and flits around us. Unfastened. Recently I’ve been reading books as a means to hold my thoughts together. Here are some of them.
Night Philosophy by Fanny Howe (Divided Publishing).
I pretend I trust surface truths, that I am moving forward, street by street, and everything I pass, is passed . . . The street that I can’t see exists now in a state that will receive me as I enter it and everyone else will enter the next moment at the same moment I do.
Recommended to me by a bookseller from another bookshop, inside the radical bookshop Burning House Books in Glasgow. We had just met, and I was struck by the ease with which he sat in the sun, at a chair by the shop window. I asked him for a book that felt like night in pauses and he recommended Night Philosophy. I’m thinking about the way we drift through spaces as though they are always fixed. Do these buildings expect us?
Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino (4th Estate)
To communicate an identity requires some degree of self delusion. A performer, in order to be convincing, must conceal the discreditable facts that he has had to learn about the performance –
Technology has fractured our outlooks on the world. I think a lot about what it means to be on the Internet and how sometimes it feels tempting to trade a lot of yourself away in order to garner mainstream interest as a public figure. Jia writes about this in a relatable way in her book of essays.
Abandon by Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay. Translated by Arunava Sinha. (Tilted Axis)
A mangy dog sat near Roo’s feet, half its ear torn off. It was gasping for breath. The dog would die any minute. Roo was observing it carefully. Ishwari was carrying a bottle of glucose water for Roo – when he collapsed he had to be given concentrated glucose water. Grabbing the bottle from her, Roo poured a little out on the floor. Gasping, the dog lapped it up.
I remember when I first read this. Ishwari is a character written with split perspective. The way this is managed is so elegant. The story too. This moment in the book where we see Roo’s innate kindness draws me, it makes me think about how we necessitate acts of kindness.
Death by Sex Machine by Franny Choi (Sibling Rivalry)
‘I once made my mouth a technology of softness. I listened carefully as I drank.’
Franny Choi is one of my favourite poets. This chapbook, described as ‘cyborg rosetta’ captivates me because of the way that it suggests the ways that we adapt, but also how we are adapted by outside forces. I think of the parameters around the choices that are available to us.
This Tilting World by Colette Fellous translated by Sophie Lewis (Les Fugitives).
How to work so that everything both connects and comes apart and we see it all anew. How to dig beneath first impressions, to discover a second language, to create hidden connections, associations, reminders, echoes, harmonies.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about that frisson of echoes and breaks. We connect and come apart, all at once, wondering at which point our hands reached each other. At what point did our hands pull away?
]]>Raymond Antrobus, All the Names Given (signed) (book for the launch here)
Celebrating all the love given and all the places that love connects, All the Names Given honours the gaps between the said and unsaid with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim. A modern classic.
Tom Chivers, London Clay: Journeys in the Deep City
Eight walks that go deep through two millennia and multiple geological strata, revealing the many ways to live, move and leave a trace in London's clay. Tom Chivers brings a poet's eye to the extraordinary and everyday of the city.
Tice Cin, Keeping the House (signed)
A love song sung between mothers and daughters, a story with a secret heart where cabbages are king. Tice Cin's blazing debut wraps you up tight in its intergenerational trauma & recovery, and spins you round to its layered N17 beats.
John Cooper Clarke, I Wanna Be Yours paperback (signed - book plates)
"Deep as the deep Atlantic ocean / That’s how deep is my devotion": John Cooper Clarke sounds out an amazing life dedicated to the deep beat of language, truth, movies, drugs & Manchester in this wild ride of a memoir.
Lucie Elven, The Weak Spot (signed) (book for the launch event here)
Like The Magic Mountain in exquisite miniature, Lucie Elven's debut novel delves deep from its European mountain heights into the human drama of power and passion as seen through one charismatic pharmacist. Fabulous and fabular.
Shon Faye, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice (signed)
If anyone can hit home all the arguments for justice under the trans umbrella, it's Shon Faye. Combining rigorous research and a wide range of experiences, this book puts trans voices at the centre of the conversation, where they belong.
Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You? (signed indie exclusive edition)
Combining conversations with friends (via long emails) with relationships between normal people (writers, warehouse pickers, political aides, editors), Rooney's third is everything you want – and all about how we know what we want.
How do you become a great photographer? Start here. This collection brings together the legendary Saul Leiter's most popular colour images with unpublished works, gleaned from an archive of 80,000 times, to cast light on his process.
Of This Our Country: Acclaimed Nigerian Writers on the Home, Identity and Culture They Know
24 beautiful personal essays to expand your vision of Africa's most populous nation, including new work by some Burley Fisher faves such as Inua Ellams and Irenosen Okojie among the wide-ranging and stellar selection of contributors.
Mehreen Baig, Hidden Lessons: Growing Up on the Frontline of Teaching
Want a thoughtful account from the frontline of teaching? Hidden Lessons is the one. Mehreen Baig started teaching at 21; here she celebrates her students' journeys alongside her own, dropping wisdom on growing up for everyone.
Malorie Blackman, Endgame
It's finally here. The endgame of Noughts and Crosses delivers, as Sephy sets out to solve a murder that's tearing the country apart, and make her amends for betraying Callum. 100% satisfying conclusion to the greatest series ever.
JJ Bola, The Selfless Act of Breathing
Hit by a devastating loss, Michael leaves his teaching job in London to travel the US partying – finding a freedom where he also realises he brings his complex mesh of identities as a British Congolese man with him. On the Road refreshed.
Michael Bracewell, Souvenir
Michael Bracewell peels away the yuppie façade of 1980s London, finding the squats, bedsits, edge lands, parties, playlists and weirdnesses of a city just about to be gentrified by turbo-capitalism and computing. An earworm of a book.
Michaela Coel, Misfits: A Personal Manifesto
Michaela Coel's MacTaggart lecture set the world on fire with its revelations about what race, class and gender mean for creative work, and why it needs to change. Her perfectly-titled manifesto builds on her call to take pride in our differences.
Warren Ellis, Nina Simone's Gum
Warren Ellis stole a piece of Dr Nina Simone's chewed gum at Meltdown festival, and kept it – then had it cast in bronze for an exhibition, and now he's written a meditation on the gum as a symbol of how we remember, honour and keep alive.
Lauren Groff, Matrix
Marie is 17 and alone: she's been kicked out of the royal court in disgrace, and sent to an impoverished nunnery, not as a novice but as the prioress, where she finds love, inspiration and purpose. Fans of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Kate O'Brien will similarly find love & inspiration here.
Sharna Jackson, Black Artists Shaping the World
A fantastic back to school gift for young artists – and anyone who loves art. High Rise Mystery author Sharna Jackson brings her experience at Tate and Site Gallery to this dazzling overview of global Black artists shaking up art across all media.
Louis Menand, The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War
From Hannah Arendt to Elvis Presley, and Jean-Paul Sartre to James Baldwin, Louis Menand surveys the mid-century creative work that has come to define our ideas of freedom and invention. Feat. John Cage's outing as a trivia nerd on Italian TV.
Jessica Nordell, The End of Bias: How We Change Our Minds
All too often pop science is used to assert set behaviours and inevitable structures. Not so, says Jessica Nordell, because both cognitive science and social psychology tell us: we can change. And here's how. An essential read.
John O'Connell, Bowie's Books: The Hundred Literary Heroes Who Changed His Life
In 2013, David Bowie made a list of his 100 top reads for an exhibition about his life and work. John O'Connell takes the list as a joyous springboard for short essays on the joys of reading, the history of culture, and the byways of inspiration.
Ruth Ozeki, The Book of Form and Emptiness
Ruth Ozeki follows up A Tale for the Time Being with another mind-bending, heart-rending work of meta wizardry told through Benny Oh and his widowed mother, a charismatic street artist, a homeless philosopher, and the Book itself.
Richard Powers, Bewilderment
Unsurprising to hear the film rights to this Arrival meets Flowers for Algernon cosmic tale have been snapped up, where astrobiologist Theo Byrne takes his eco-conscious, grieving son to other planets as therapy for his violent outbursts.
Claudia Roden, Med: A Cookbook
The best is back: Claudia Roden has been broadening the UK's consciousness of Mediterranean food on an east and south heading since 1968. Now she revisits cuisines "from Provence to Petra, Madrid to Morocco" with an informal twist.
Iain Sinclair, The Gold Machine: In the Tracks of the Mule Dancers
Iain Sinclair's great-uncle Arthur set out to Peru with dreams of land and gold: following in his footsteps, Sinclair uses the journey and his excoriating style to unpack Arthur's complicity in the colonial nightmare and its consequences.
Wole Soyinka, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth
In his first novel for 50 years, Soyinka spares no-one from his brilliantly satirical glare, following Dr. Menka and his gilded friend Duyole from a grisly trade in body parts to the equally grisly backroom deals of international politics. Mesmerising.
Sophia Thakur, illustrated by Denzell Dankwah, Superheroes: Inspiring Stories of Secret Strength
Super inspiration for the new school year! The first book for young readers from #Merky comes with an intro from Stormzy, and vivid portraits in poetic words and comic book-inspired images from dream Sophia Thakur and Denzell Dankwah.
Lynne Tillman, Weird Fucks
Weird fucks: many of us have them, but few if any can spin them into literary gold the way Lynne Tillman does in this novella that disappears down the sexual rabbit hole to reflect on masculinity, desire, solitude… the whole human condition thing.
Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated by Polly Gannon, Just the Plague
Based on events in the USSR in the 1930s, written in the 1980s and rediscovered during lockdown, Just the Plague's haunting morality tale of vaccines and infection vectors is translated into English by Polly Gannon at the perfect moment.
Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle
In 1960s Harlem, Ray Carney finds himself caught between his current life as an upstanding family man, and the birth family he left behind. But cash is tight, and cousin Freddie's onto a sure thing. Just one hotel heist to fence, right? Right?
Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism
Rafia Zakaria's blistering book takes apart the claims of trickle-down, liberal, "lean in" feminisms reliant on racism and nationalism, ignoring decades of intersectional, transnational feminism for all, whose potency Zakaria amplifies.
Adam Zmith, Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures
Adam Zmith couldn't have predicted that Deep Sniff would hit shelves as poppers make headlines in the Canadian election – but, as he argues, poppers are modern history, creating euphoric, eccentric connections through their power to open us up.
]]>For that extra "headed to the beach" feeling, why not snap up our brand-new summery tangerine tote bag for all your book (and more) toting needs.
Gorgeous food to make and share, supporting a great cause.
In the Garden: Essays on Nature and Growing
Whether you're an avid allotment planter or a keen window-ledge herber, or completely mystified by the actual growing of things, these essays will entrance you.
David Annand, Peterdown
Satire's not dead in David Annand's deft hands: this is literal fan fiction in which Peterdown United supporter Colin goes all out to save his team, their ground & the town from high-speed gentrification.
Oana Aristide, Under the Blue
An absolute trip, with AI babies, pandemics and climate change very much front of mind. This exhilarating debut novel is great company for those in-between times while travelling, or for curling up with while staying still.
Jeremy Atherton Lin, Gay Bar: Why We Went Out
In, out, or still unsure about gadding about, this is a great read whether you're coming home & coming down right now, remembering past glories (& glory holes), or just looking for a great read.
Percival Everett, Damned If I Do
Tall tales where a man walks into a cafe, wild goose car chases, good fishing stories, even a writer thinking about writing… this collection by an American master has everything to reel you in & feed you up.
Kaitlyn Greenidge, Libertie
Completely, utterly absorbing. Kaitlyn Greenidge plunges you into fully-realised worlds: the Civil War era in Brooklyn, at a rural Black college, and in middle-class Haiti, as one determined young woman moves through them. Phenomenal.
Ra Jarrar, Love is an Ex-Country
Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas for a new generation, as queer Arab American trans femme Ra Jarrar travels through the muddled middle of the US, standing up to social media haters & finding love as he/she goes. Rip-roaring road tripping.
David Keenan, Monument Maker
KEENAN KLAXON! Lots going on here, as you'd expect, with a particular shout out to the secret initiatory cult that has its roots in macabre experiments in cryptozoology in pre-war Europe. Light summer fun.
Nina Mingya Powles, Small Bodies of Water
Winner of the inaugural Nan Shepherd Prize, Small Bodies of Water is a full body experience looking into "what are the edges of a body of water, where does it stop and where does it begin?" as Nina Mingya Powles told Katie Goh for The Skinny.
Nanjala Nyabola, Travelling While Black: Essays Inspired by a Life on the Move
As Ann Morgan writes, "Nyabola’s arguments are as fearless and intrepid as her journeys have been" in these wide-ranging essays – ranging in the sense of the places to which Nyabola travels, and of her exhilarating style relating her expansive perceptions.
Leone Ross, This One Sky Day
A novel in which pumpums go on their own adventures across the islands of Popisho is a holiday season must-read. Dive into the gorgeousness of this kaleidoscopic look at a community on the eve of a wedding, where secrets will out.
Anita Sethi, I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain
Whether you're walking the Pennines or not, this is a moving, thoughtful and engaging consideration of who gets told they can walk and why that matters, with some great journeying reflections on the way.
Rivers Solomon, Sorrowland
A truly wild & rewilding book, no holds barred science fiction that takes on Church and state through the eyes & mind of a teenage mother becoming something… else, protecting her kids and her self-knowledge at all costs. A full-body read.
Jeff VanderMeer, Hummingbird Salamander
Clever, cinematic, compassionate cli-fi from a sci-fi master. Follow the taxidermied hummingbird on the trail of corruption and conspiracy as Jane puts together the pieces on why she's facing an urgent crisis that reflects our own. Gripping.
Samantha Walton, Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure
Lush with careful observations of experiences close and far, from suburban verges to Lourdes and icy mountains, Samantha Walton not only attends to how we're sold our own need for connection, but offers rich alternatives. A gift.
Venetia Welby, Dreamtime (signed pre-orders available for 1 Sept)
Cli-fi… with cats. And quests. And yearning, as Sol crosses half the world to find her father, a US marine stationed in Okinawa, amid poisoned, rising seas, where ghosts of both pasts and futures await.
]]>Samantha Walton, Everybody Needs Beauty: In Search of the Nature Cure
We're delighted to be launching Sam Walton's hotly-anticipated look at the politics of the nature cure and whether we can ever get outside capitalism. Pre-order now with 10% off, and get a link to the online event, in conversation with Alice Tarbuck, on 28 July 2021! Beauty.
Guillem Balague, Maradona: The Boy. The Rebel. The God.
Euros fever has you wanting all great football, all the time / Euros meh has you wanting something better? What could be greater than this: one of the best sports journalists on the G.O.A.T., Maradona.
Candice Brathwaite, Sista Sister
Loved I Am Not Your Baby Mother? Get more Candice Brathwaite, or discover her wisdom, this time with engaging essays of intimate, straight-shooting advice she wished she had as a young Black girl in Britain.
Max Egremont, The Glass Wall: Lives on the Baltic Frontier
The Eastern Baltic brings with it big questions & hard histories around borders & control – but also rich & complex cultures and landscapes. Part travelogue, part oral history, part reflection on limits & being in place.
Akwaeke Emezi, Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir
Akwaeke Emezi changes the world of literature again with their fourth book, a Black spirit memoir that delves deep and sings in wild registers of embodiment outside the bounds, more-than-human. Profound.
Rivka Galchen, Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch
An incredible historical find underlies Rivka Galchen's new novel: that Astronomer Royal Johannes Kepler's mother Katharina, known for her herbal remedies, was accused of witchcraft. Here, she tells her side of the story.
Rick Gekoski, Guarded by Dragons: Encounters with Rare Books and Rare People
It's a book about books, by someone who knows pretty much everything about them: how to read them, how to find them, and how to take care of them. Rollicking wild quests of the most bookish sort.
Beryl Gilroy, Black Teacher
Back in print with a new foreword by Bernardine Evaristo, Beryl Gilroy's memoir is a great place to go next if you love Small Axe, Small Island, or the huge significance of the Windrush Generation. Jam-packed full of insight.
Calla Henkel, Other People's Clothes
What if the eccentric crime novelist owner of your summer rental were using you as inspiration? What if you were lost in grief & longing, and decided to give her material? What could possibly go wrong?
Harold Sonny Ladoo, No Pain Like This Body
First published by Anansi in 1972, Harold Sonny Ladoo's book returns to meet the moment once more, with its look back to the early 20th century in the Eastern Caribbean, and a precarious Hindu rice-farming community.
Claire North, Notes from the Burning Age
If someone approached you with forbidden texts from a time of climate disaster, texts that could change – maybe destroy – everything you know, what would you do? That's the challenge facing the archivist Ven in Claire North's fiery new novel.
Morgan Parker, Other People's Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night
Missed Morgan Parker's debut when it first dazzled? Grab it now with a new introduction by Danez Smith, and revel in poetry that knows no boundaries, covers all the bases and grabs all the feels.
Michael Pollan, This Is Your Mind On Plants: Opium-Caffeine-Mescaline
Or: why is caffeine legal when opium and mescaline aren't? Pollan, as ever, provides personal testimony on ingestion to set against social, cultural and political histories of legislation. Consume wisely.
Rachel Roddy, An A-Z of Pasta: Stories, Shapes, Sauces, Recipes
This is your mind on pasta. Actually, it's the mind of one of our best contemporary food writers, an expert on eating Italian here taking us from the basics to the baroque. Absolutely delicious.
Amartya Sen, Home in the World: A Memoir
From being named by Rabindranath Tagore in Santiniketan to becoming Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Amartya Sen travels the complex rivers of British-Bengali relations across his lifetime, while thinking about why education matters.
Clare Sestanovich, Objects of Desire
"It’s a pleasure to see the world through their sharp eyes," writers the NY Times of Clare Sestanovich's young female narrators who, in most cases, are just working out what they desire, or watching others who have worked it out, with tenderness.
Manon Uphoff, trans. Sam Garrett, Falling is Like Flying
Uphoff's devastatingly beautiful autofiction deservedly won the Netherlands' Charlotte Kohler Prize in 2020. In it, a young woman relays the horrors of her abusive childhood & the difficult powers of survival. Astounding.
Otegha Uwagba, We Need to Talk About Money
An amazing book about how the taboos around money reveal what it is: a matter of class, race, gender and privilege. Looking at work, rent, relationships and family, Otegha Uwagba's candid study blows away the shame and gets real.
Alex von Tunzelmann, Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History
A timely cultural history, handy to take to protests. It shows how statues don't erase history when they fall, they reveal its difficult truths and often write new stories that help us know ourselves.
]]>At BF we've been waiting for this month's Indie Fiction Subscription title, Variations by Juliet Jacques for two years now, since Juliet read some of her work-in-progress at an event for our Regenerate writing group. Look out for our podcast interview with Juliet, and meanwhile enjoy our chat with Gary Budden and Kit Caless, and follow Influx on 🐦@influxpress and 📸 @influxpress for what's coming next…
Happy 9th birthday! Acquired for Development By was published in April 2012, approximately a thousand years ago, and it still feels so fresh and relevant, as does Life in Transit (nine years ago this month). Do you feel like you’re still powered by that same rage and energy now?
GB: Damn that makes me feel old. But it’s nice to hear people still consider it relevant – I think it’s general points about gentrification and redevelopment still stand. Both Kit and I no longer live in Hackney, me for several years, so it does feel like a bit of a time capsule for me now. Part of me feels that actually a lot of this kind of writing about these parts of London, ostensibly objecting to the rapid gentrification of the area, actually helped hasten that progress. But the work itself still stands up.
I haven’t looked at Acquired for Development By in a long time, and it’s well out-of-print, but I’m still proud of it – though of course we would do things differently now. That book was very much us learning as we went along how to put together and publish a book – which at the time seemed like an incredibly opaque and mysterious process.
We’re still motivated by the same energy that made us want to publish that book – the idea that we wanted to publish work we thought was valuable and that we want to read that may not find a home elsewhere.
KC: You know I didn’t think we would do this for nine years. There’s a point during every one of those nine years I’ve wanted to put it all in the bin and do something else, but I just can’t do it – the longer it goes on the more there is to lose and the more elongated our legacy, I suppose.
I’m glad AFDB still feels fresh, and I’d like to think all our books do. That’s possibly because Gary, Sanya and I don’t really look for trends or books a la mode, so they can’t necessarily be lumped into a certain time period. But with AFDB, I think we thought the gentrification process of east London had reached its apex in 2011/2. Little did we know it was probably only just beginning of the middle. Like Gary says, there is a worry that we’ve contributed to that by documenting and publishing about Hackney, but I think our intentions were sound, and I feel with anything, if the intention is ok, then whatever the end result, you can still hold your head high.
I think I have, perhaps, a different energy these days. Back then it was just exciting to start something, and I’ve always been someone who finds the start of things the most exciting part of life – now we’re established, there’s more of an energy of, ok what can we do next within Influx, rather than let’s start something new from scratch.
How did you kick off as a publisher? What’s the secret for turning that “let’s do this” discussion into actually doing it – and keeping it going for nearly a decade?
GB: We never really had the aim to be a publisher – initially the idea was just to do Acquired for. There was never any sort of plan, but the book did well enough that we wanted to continue. For the first few years Influx was very much a side-project, with only a few titles a year, and it grew organically until we made a decision to take it more seriously as a fulltime thing.
In terms of how to turn an ‘idea that sounds good in the pub’ into actually doing it… all I can say is that you have to begin. It sounds trite, but it’s true.
And not expect everything to be perfect immediately or have success overnight – due to the distorting lens of social media, we tend to see only the successes, the high points and the positive edited reality of what people are doing, where in fact there’s a huge amount of everyday, boring, work that keeps a press like Influx going. So you have to be prepared to do all that behind the scenes work that is neither sexy nor Instagrammable.
If ever I need motivation, I end up putting on the 80s NYHC classic, ‘Start Today’ by Gorilla Biscuits, that teaches you all you need to know about getting things done.
KC: I think it helps that Gary and I have known each other since we were eleven years old. We know each other very well, what makes us tick, what annoys us, what to do when the other one is stressed. A lot of the publishing houses within the UK independent scene are marriage / civil partnership run – like And Other Stories, Galley Beggar, Bluemoose, etc., and in a way Gary and I are in some sort of marriage – at least we bicker like we are. I think, somehow, that helps the direction of the press, because you’re a team outside of just having a business vision. Influx represents who Gary, Sanya and I are, as much as it stands a publishing house. You don’t get that with corporate publishing, I think.
With regards to starting stuff, yeah just get on with it. No one’s waiting for you. Ask people for advice, be prepared to make some serious mistakes, learn from them, move forward onto making different mistakes. Eventually, you’ll be proud of what you’ve done because you’ve taken a risk to do something. I get the feeling a lot of people can drift through life without challenging themselves.
I’ve messed up enough times in my professional and personal life by now, at the grand age of 38, to know that everything you do teaches you something about yourself. You may not like what you discover about who you are, but it’s better to know your true self than to keep who you are hidden from your view. Publishing, as with life in general, is fraught with ethical, emotional and philosophical dilemmas – and provides a richness to your human experience.
What’s changed in publishing and bookselling since you started, for good and bad? And how are you imagining the next decade?
GB: I think that the status of independent publishers is much higher now than it was a decade ago, that we are more visible and certainly taking more seriously at a mainstream level. Significant successes from indie publishers (many who formed around the time we did) have helped elevate the role we play, especially at a time when more mainstream publishing feels risk averse and catering to a limited demographic.
The next decade will be interesting. I suppose now Influx is considered part of the old guard of indie publishing – I really hope there are WhatsApp groups full of aspiring indie publishers pointing out everything we do wrong and saying how they’d do it much better than these guys pushing 40. That to me would be a sign of a healthy creative culture.
Mainstream (by which I mean Big 5) publishing seems to be in a tumultuous state, making pleasing noises about issues of diversity and representation but doesn’t seem to be acting on them very quickly. Publishing is a business like any other, and these giant companies will naturally, always, publish work that follows trends and sells books – you could see it as depressing that TV celebrities become best-selling fiction authors, or incredibly basic self-help platitudes disguised as fiction sell in their millions, but all this seems to happen in a world very distant from what Influx are doing.
How I imagine the next decade? I hope that the conversation about class in the publishing world will increase dramatically, and that something is done about it.
KC: It’s an interesting question. Gary and I had no experience in publishing before we started Influx, not even a single day in media, really. So we came at the industry from proper leftfield. We didn’t know anything about the ‘industry’ when we started so everything we’ve learned has always been through the lens of Influx, apart from our own published writings, of course.
I’ve enjoyed seeing Burley Fisher grow, I must say, and that’s not just to flatter you guys. Burley Fisher, Pages of Hackney, Review Bookshop, amongst so many others (and so many outside of London too) all seemed to start post-banking crisis, and that’s been incredibly useful for Influx and other independents. Creating a network of publishers and booksellers who believe in books that are trying to push envelopes has been the best thing over the last decade.
As everyone in the book industry knows, audiobooks are currently the future. And I don’t just say that because my next book is an audio-original! Haha. But it does seem that it’s heading that way. I think there’s a really interesting space opening up where a book maybe written for audio first, and then rewritten for print after the audio book is out. They are different media, and just reading a print book out loud is not going to cut it in the near future, so audio-originals are being written with audio in mind from the get go. We may see small independent audiobook producers popping up to challenge Audible and the big 5 in house audiobook producers, which would be very exciting.
You’re also very much a London publisher in the best sense of untelling and retelling the city’s less-heard stories, most recently with Lucifer Over London: A Guide to the Adopted City, as well as books about the city’s margins. Why is the local important to you? How have you seen it change over the last decade, and how is that reflected in your titles – thinking of Frankie Miren’s forthcoming The Service, for example?
GB: I love London, and have lived here many years now. I think it’s normal to take a keen interest in the place you live and consider home.
The term ‘London publisher’ is an odd one – you see people using that phrase as a shorthand to mean the giant companies like PRH, who do of course have their offices in London, but it’s a disappointing and myopic way to look at ‘London’.
We publish work from all over now, including work in translation, but I will always chime with a great London novel. It’s why we loved The Service when it landed on our desk – a brilliant exploration of a totally different side to the city that many readers may have little experience of.
KC: London is a literary city. Always has been, always will be. In the way New York City is like a film set when you visit due to the sheer volume of films set there, London feels like a book because it has been written about for centuries. When we publish books set in London we have to make sure they are telling a new or unheard story because we want to build on that literary legacy. We want to add new paths and spaces for the mind to travel down, rather than rehash the same old cliches, stultifying narratives that already exist.
Like Gary says, we look elsewhere these days, but there is still a bit of room left for London in our publishing schedules. It’s one of the world’s greatest cities, how can you not want to publish work about it.
There’s an intriguing kind of… fictional non-fiction? Archival fiction? Fiction with realness? I don’t know what to call it that I see in Shiromi Pinto’s Plastic Emotions and Juliet Jacques’ Variations, both of which have brilliant takes on history – or histories. They play with our ideas of what constitutes official history, and the place that emotions and personal experience have within that. First of all, do you have a term for this genre? And second, what draws you to it?
GB: I’ve always been drawn to, and fascinated by, the idea of unofficial histories. As soon as you realise that the historical narrative you are taught at school, and via the mainstream culture, is itself a form of fiction, then you realise there must be many other narratives and voices to be heard. That has always interested me – this should be one of the key roles of fiction.
KC: It’s interesting that we could call this a genre unto itself! I’m not sure one can declare one’s own genres, someone else has to do that, Wiley called grime ‘eskibeat’ when he invented it, but then someone called it ‘grime’ in the media and that stuck. So I’m unwilling to give it a name.
It’s important to me to do these things through fiction because that’s how you get the emotion into the unofficial history, plus you can play around with facts. History is a contested space, of course. I only recently learned that the Nazis were all jacked up on meth in the 30s and 40s which completely changed the way I saw the invasion of the USSR, for example haha. But there will always be competing narratives and interpretations around history, it’s a privilege to publish something like Plastic Emotions, which genuinely brought fresh light onto Minnette de Silva’s pioneering work and celebrated her as a feminist figure. With Variations, as soon as it came in we knew we had to publish it. Juliet is a fantastic writer and I learned so much in the course of editing and working on the book with her. Hopefully readers will too.
Gary and I are well aware that we are two white blokes in their late 30s running a publishing house. And it’s important to us to platform voices and histories that are not our own. Not only is it interesting to learn about things outside of our own lived experience, it’s healthy for culture too. We can be as myopic as the next man, stuck in our ways, but that’s why we have brilliant people like Sanya by our side, to help us unstick. We’re far from perfect, and we never will be, but I like to think, at least we are attempting to see outside of ourselves.
Among other things, Influx have been massive champions of short stories – publishing both anthologies and collections by writers like Linda Mannheim, Eley Williams, and Clare Fisher. Why are short stories so important – for writers, for readers? I’m also thinking about the recent proliferation of independent magazines, in print and online, like Extra Teeth, that are also championing short stories and bringing new voices through… What’s happening in that ecosystem?
GB: I’ve always loved short stories, and am a writer of them myself. The skill of constructing an effective short story shouldn’t be overlooked – there’s no room for bagginess or waffling on like there is in a novel.
KC: Short stories bang. That’s it, that’s the message. But they also provide writers a space to try out ideas, experiment with style and approach. Our recent publication Man Hating Psycho by the imperious Iphigenia Baal is a case in point – the stories there are full of verve and ambition, stuffed with electricity and experiments, you just wouldn’t be able to do with a novel.
I’m not sure the ecosystem is any different than it used to be, other than there are newer publications like Extra Teeth doing it, and doing it well. Short story collections, on the whole, still don’t sell as well as novels in the UK and I think that’s sad. But it’s also reflects the way the industry sees them. For example, the Goldsmiths Prize, which is supposed to reward experimental fiction, is not open to books of short stories, yet that’s where all the experiments are happening! The UK has a love affair with the novel that doesn’t exist in other literary cultures and I think, somehow, it’s to do with our class system. But don’t quote me on that unless someone clever can back me up with theory and evidence.
2021 has been a banner year, with a book a month landing from a very varied and ambitious list, including three translations (Self Portrait in Green, The Country Will Bring Us No Peace and Cockfight), a novel with photographs (In the Pines) and short story collections from cult faves Iphigenia Baal and Percival Everett. How’s the year shaping up? How’s the subscription model working?
GB: We could’ve done without the lockdown and global pandemic, but the year has been going very well considering. We’re actually running some live events later in the year too, which I’m looking forward to a lot – the live and social aspect was always a key element of what Influx doing and losing that has sucked.
We’re approaching 200 subscribers now, which is exciting. Maybe we’ll give the 200th subscriber a prize. (Ed: subscribe here to be in with a chance to win?!)
KC: 2021 has been pretty good, following the disaster that was Covid-19 in 2020. We so happy bookshops are reopen, for example. I think we’ll see how it pans out in the latter half of the year, but we’ve already got some books on the prize lists this year which bodes well!
All three of you – Kit, Gary and Sanya – are writers as well as editors. What does that bring to the way you work with writers as Influx editors, and to how you build your list?
GB: We understand the process from both sides, which I hope is beneficial. Having had books published, and worked with agents and editors, can only help when we’re in the publisher/editor role.
KC: I write non-fiction, so I suppose that puts me more automatically in the space of acquiring that for Influx, and I hope to do more of that in the future. Gary snaffles up all the fiction, which doesn’t leave me much room hahaha. Sanya has been instrumental in our growth, acquiring writers like Shiromi Pinto, Marie Ndiaye, and more to come, I’m so pleased with her progress and she has a wonderful eye for books. I think, as writers, perhaps we are more aware of the troubles of the writing process than only-editors, but that’s just a hunch.
Variations is our Indie Fiction subscription title this month, and it’s a completely remarkable book with a unique structure, a chronologically-ordered collection of stories, each with a different form from diary through conference paper to film script and even blog posts. What was the experience of editing it? And how are you hoping that readers respond?
KC: Editing this was a joy, a genuine joy. Juliet is such an erudite, learned and empathetic writer. She also redrafted this several times before it go to me, so it was more a case of fine tuning, asking questions and deciding on style etc, than having to overhaul any structural issues.
I hope that readers respond in the way we did when we read the submission. That this is a book chronicling an untold part of British history, as much a part of everyone’s British history as it is transgender Brits. It’s tempting for publishers to pretend they are publishing for a certain community, but that just assumes those outside the community won’t be interested. Trans people will feel that their history is being represented, I think, but regular old cis-het fellas like me will get a lot out of this book too. It’s British history, told from a different angle. You can’t not like it.
It’s a set of wonderful stories that take you in immediately, with wit and skill rarely seen in fiction. I hope it will sell big and win some prizes, but you can never know that will happen until it does. It deserves to be in the canon of great experimental story telling, and Juliet is one in a million. The cover is sick too, which always helps.
Max Porter writes of Influx: “They call out bullshit. They scream praise for good work, good people and good ideas. They are political.” So: what’s the bullshit that needs calling out in publishing and bookselling? What have you come up against in publishing writers who are (one or more of) working-class, Black, queer and trans? And, beyond calling it out, what needs to be done?
GB: I could write about 10,000 words on all the bullshit that needs calling out in publishing.
For me, the biggest, unavoidable problem is one of class. It seems absurd that two white grammar-school educated men from Kent can still feel out of place at certain literary events, but we do. An industry primarily made up of people all from a certain culture and background is always going to struggle to identify and publish important work that comes from outside that world.
We have the problem of an overwhelmingly white middle-class ‘literary’ culture supplied by an industry also made up of those people, catering for readers broadly from that demographic.
I struggle greatly with the idea of ‘literary person as a personality’, or the notion of reading fiction making a person exceptional in some way. I don’t believe there to be anything inherently valuable in fiction as an artform – it all depends what is being written. Fiction can be an electrifying and radical thing, but it can just as easily be a bourgeois indulgence or a mollifying and unchallenging form of reassurance.
Problems we’ve come up against? It’s clear to me now that work by working-class men is much harder to get reviewed and find a readership in the current climate, which is very disappointing. But on the positive side, there has been great support for the black, queer and trans writers we have published so far – the reception for Variations has been a wonderful thing to see.
KC: Most of the conversations about publishing happen on Twitter these days, it seems. I think it’s best for us to just get on with what we’re doing, rather than pontificate about it. I used to want to wade into arguments about diversity and representation, but I don’t do that anymore.I think partly due to not wanting to be some voice on a big topic when there are far better qualified people to talk about it, but also because, you know, I’m not doing it perfectly either. I make mistakes, I’m as useless and boneheaded at times as any white bloke.
There’s always a temptation with straight white people like me to point a finger at other straight white people and tell them that they aren’t making enough of an effort, but I realised I was doing that to deflect from my own shortcomings. I’m done with that because, ultimately it serves no one but myself.
I think we want to quietly just do our best. We are going to announce some exciting initiatives soon that Sanya is spearheading and that is where I want to be, celebrating our progress, rather than denigrating anyone else.
19-26 June 2021 is Indie Bookshop Week. We could definitely all use the celebration!
Making it even more festive, we've teamed up with trailblazers Serpent's Tail to mark 35 years of their visionary publishing: we've got
Online customers can buy all ten with 10% off (£101.61 instead of £112.90), and get a free Burley Fisher x Serpent's Tail IBW tote bag and bookmark too!
To quote our review of Detransition, Baby, these are books where "Everything is terrible and everything is beautiful" – a Serpent's Tail trait of seeing the world in its fullness and from the most necessary of angles.
In chronological order of publication, we're showing some love to…
Quicksand & Passing, Nella Larsen (1928 & 1929)
A deserved all-time bestselling title for its US publisher, Nella Larsen's two novels, written within a year of each other, come together as an excellent diptych, as both deal with psychic dualism – and in particular, the doubled double consciousness of Black women in 1920s America, drawing on Larsen's own experience. Part of the bright, brilliant blaze of the Harlem Renaissance, Quicksand and Passing retain their incendiary charge through their incisive and intimate portrayals of tightrope navigations of intertwined racial and gendered hierarchies. With a high-profile film adaptation of Passing starring Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga on its way, this is the perfect moment to read (or re-read) Larsen.
Jernigan, David Gates (1991)
I Love Dick, Chris Kraus (1997)
White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, Joe Boyd (2006)
If there’s someone who has seen it all in music, it’s Joe Boyd. In his book White Bicycles, the man who was pivotal in the early days of Pink Floyd, behind the desk when Nick Drake recorded River Man live with the LSO for Five Leaves Left, and managed the rise of Sandy Denny, recounts the forgotten details, secret encounters and whirlwind nights of the most important age in popular music. What’s remarkable about Boyd’s perspective is the varying vantage points he witnessed musical history from, whether as a manager, producer, club promoter or simply a friend to some of pop music’s greatest figures, there is no one who has had the access that Boyd has. It isn’t just about folk either, Boyd wanders through encounters with blues icons like Muddy Waters, psychedelic acid-rock pioneers Traffic and brushes shoulders with the likes of Miles Davis and Dylan. Always absorbing, often moving and told with great care and observation, this is a memoir of rare depth about a musical era we’d have all loved to live through.
I Hate the Internet, Jarett Kobek (2016)
The original cancel culture novel, I Hate the Internet by Jarett Kobek follows a semi-famous graphic novelist called Adeline. After a guest lecture to some students in which she gives a tirade against pop culture figures and women in technology, which is subsequently posted online, Adeline spends most of the novel trying to mitigate her negative online reputation while dealing with her ambivalent feelings about the huge boost in sales of her cult comic series that come along with it. This hilarious and anarchic novel attempts to cut up and imitate the online forms that it satirises, and it felt like the first natively post-social media novel I had read when it was published just as the first natively post-social media president took residence in the White House.
In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado (2019)
"I came of age, then, in the Dream House, wisdom practically smothering me in my sleep. Everything tasted like an almost epiphany." Carmen Maria Machado dives deep into the "smothering" wisdom of folk tales to rip the roof off the Dream House of patriarchy. What does it mean to grow up with fairytales of romance that persistently cast women as passive, innocent, weak – and victims? And what happens when that pervasive fantasy meets the untold reality of violence within a lesbian relationship? In short, sharp sections that fold back and forth across time, collecting talismanic books and movies and moments that eventually plot an alternate story, Machado delves deep to offer stunning clarity as she breaks herself free. You read In the Dream House, as it was written, heart in mouth: every word tastes like blood.
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals, Saidiya Hartman (2019)
From its epigraph from Nella Larsen's Quicksand onwards, Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments plunges the reader into the exhilarating, complicated, stylish, sexy, determined, brilliant world of free Black women in early twentieth century Northern US: a world gleaned mainly from sources compiled by those who sought to control these riotous women who were, as Hartman argues, making the modern world: fighting for autonomy in their identity, sexuality, work, and creativity, their relation to their bodies, their neighbourhoods and their place in history. Bursting forth from sociological and criminological archives, refusing to be hidden or controlled, these radical, rebellious voices are braided by Hartman into an utterly irresistible, unforgettable chorus.
Detransition, Baby, Torrey Peters (2021)
Detransition, Baby! sucks you in and doesn’t let up. Dark and funny, it’s outlandishness never seems far-fetched and more so focuses on allowing the characters to be flawed and loveable. The story is about Reese (a trans woman), Ames (Reese’s ex and detransitioned from being Amy), Katrina (a Jewish Chinese cis woman) and an unexpected pregnancy. It draws parallels between trans women and divorced cis women (the book's dedication being to divorced women) and their struggles to reestablish their personhood. Refreshingly, the story never tries to equate any struggle with another, only to thread together compassion. Everything is terrible and everything is beautiful. Add it to your summer reading list and enjoy the ride!
Libertie, Kaitlyn Greenidge (2021)
Libertie Sampson doesn't want to become a doctor. She doesn't want to be a wife. She wants what her name offers: to be free. A freeborn Black girl who comes of age in rural Brooklyn just after the Civil War, witnessing its racist atrocities, Libertie loves and admires her doctor mother, but chafes at her strategic service to the disparaging white townspeople. She is drawn to complex figures of freedom's possibilities and pains: first, Ben Daisy, a man escaping slavery but haunted by love; the Graces, two music students at the college where she is studying medicine (the only woman to do so), but falling in love with song; and Emmanuel, her mother's skilful apprentice, the sophisticated scion of a middle-class family in Haiti, where she travels as his wife. Pregnancy leads her to uncover unbearable secrets in Emmanuel's family, and her quest for freedom brings her full circle. A deeply satisfying tour de force.
Cwen, Alice Albinia (10% until end June) (2021)
At this point in 2021, we're all about ready for a feminist revolution in government in the UK, right? But the inhabitants of an unnamed archipelago off Northumbria are deeply divided when Eve, a London incomer who has led a quiet, quirky and purposeful sea change in the governance and functioning of the islands, disappears, and an inquest takes place into just how her band of resisters took over. With deep roots in myths that placed a sacred island of women off the coast of Britain, Alice Albinia's tale resonates in its consideration of gender politics, and in its spiritual search for reconnection.
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In advance of the conversation, Carmen recommends her five top current queer reads, all exploring lesbian lives, loves and liberations.
We recommend reading them alongside Carmen's books In the Dream House and Her Body and Other Parties!
Leah Horlick, For Your Own Good
Terry Castle, The Professor: A Sentimental Education
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
Melissa Febos, Abandon Me: Memoirs
Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity
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England's Dreaming, Jon Savage
A classic in a new edition, with a new introduction by Jeremy Deller and Scott King, just in time for another summer of insurrection.
Filthy Animals, Brandon Taylor (bookplates)
If you haven't read Brandon Taylor yet, what are you waiting for? Dazzling short stories that explore the Whartonesque relation between surface calm and inner intensity *chef's kiss*.
Heaven, Mieko Kawakami, translated by David Boyd and Sam Bett
Mieko Kawakami follows up Breast and Eggs with a completely different novel, yet one that shares her bestseller's interiority and exploration of the shameful mundane – here focused on bullied school kids who find a strange friendship.
The Middle Ages: A Graphic History, Eleanor Janega, illustrated by Neil Max Emmanuel
Looking massively forward to this women-with-swords-led look back at an era of change, turmoil and invention.
Sankofa, Chibundu Onuzo
We were big fans of Chibundu Onuzo's debut Welcome to Lagos, so pretty psyched for this transcontinental, transgenerational journey taking one woman from radical London in the 1970s to the halls of power in West Africa.
The Startup Wife, Tahmima Anam
A brilliant novel about whether we're living appily ever after. Tahmima Anam imagines what it's like at the centre of the social media whirlwind, as Asha's algorithm creates a killer app, promoted by her charismatic husband Cyrus.
Sterling Karat Gold, Isabel Waidner
Peninsula Press bring their signature style to fiction, with Isabel Waidner's brilliant, chilling, incisive third novel in which Sterling, a writer living in East London, is arrested for no reason. This is their thrilling fight back.
Summerwater, Sarah Moss (paperback, bookplates)
Summer, in the most Scottish of senses: rain, grey skies, mountains, heavier rain, dangerous driving, a holiday camp, a new arrival, a haunted sense of what might occur…
Tokyo Redux, David Peace (bookplates)
American-Japanese relations from the Occupation to the end of the Cold War: David Peace's new novel is a detective story with a historical difference, a crime committed in the shadow of greater crimes.
Variations, Juliet Jacques
Eleven stories set over one and a half centuries, Juliet Jacques' fiction debut Variations is a love letter to trans Britain in all its best dresses and bow ties, written in brilliantly imagined non-fiction forms from court reports to blogs.
Fiction
Animal, Lisa Taddeo
You loved Three Women, you're going to love this powerful, unfiltered, dangerous novel from Lisa Taddeo. And you're going to want to buy 5 copies to read it with all your friends.
Assembly, Natasha Brown
The fault lines of race, class and gender break against each other in Natasha Brown's brilliantly-observed novel of manners (and who makes them) Assembly, as the Black British narrator attends her boyfriend's family's country house party.
Black Water Sister, Zen Cho
A dead, goddess-worshipping Malaysian grandmother wants revenge on a local magnate, and she's not above using the body of her American granddaughter, visiting Malaysia for the first time since she was a baby, to get it. So much fun.
Cwen, Alice Albinia
What if women took over the civic and business functions of a small archipelago off the coast of Northumbria (and men wanted the power back)? What if that takeover harked back to earlier pre-industrial times and strange magic?
The Day I Fell Off My Island, Yvonne Bailey-Smith
Teenage Erna is sent from Jamaica and the care of her elderly grandfather to England, to live with the mother she hardly knows, starting a difficult, rich and emotional conversation that lasts a decade.
An Experiment in Leisure, Anna Glendenning
Maxine Peake adores this book, what more do you need to know? It's about being young, adrift from your past, wondering whether uni was worth it, serving coffee, doing therapy, hiding from yourself while trying to reconnect to your family.
Ghosted: A Love Story, Jenn Ashworth
Gone Girl but make it real? A twisty, unsettling look at grief, memory and desire, as Jenn Ashworth looks into what really happened when Laurie's husband Mark disappeared, and why Laurie herself can't quite remember.
The Penguin Book of Spanish Short Stories, edited by Margaret Jull Costa
Two centuries of Spanish fiction, both realist and fantastical, often blurring the edges between. Familiar names like Manuel Rivas and Javier Marías mingle with Spanish greats less well known in the UK: dig in!
The Promise, Damon Galgut
A major new novel about the betrayals wrought by white South Africa, situated in one white family who break their promise to their Black servant, but resonating with and across the entire nation as it strives to address the past.
Queer Square Mile: Queer Short Stories from Wales, edited by Kirsti Bohata, Mihangel Morgan, and Huw Osborne
Fantastical tales from Wales, writing queerness and its desires into local history, familiar places, folk tales and fictional forms.
A Shock, Keith Ridgway
A fragmentary, allusive and mysterious book about a group of loosely-connected characters on the fringes of London life, as they disappear and reappear, sometimes within their own sanity.
This is Yesterday, Rose Ruane
Peach goes back to her family – and back to her 1990s suburban adolescence, when, longing inchoate and incarnate, she was searching for something in all the wrong places & tearing things apart. Can she repair them now?
The Woman in the Purple Skirt, Natsuko Imamura, translated by Lucy North
This is one of those atmospheric books where any preview or review says too much. Just to say then: it's about being surveilled (or is it), about moving through the world feeling haunted, and it will haunt you.
Non fiction
(M)otherhood: On the choices of being a woman, Pragya Agarwal
Pragya Agarwal looks at the social and political constructions of motherhood, including how reproductive justice continues to be shaped by race and class as well as gender. A powerful, personal & political history, meticulously researched.
Musical Truth: A Musical History of Modern Black Britain in 28 Songs, Jeffrey Boakye, illustrated by Ngadi Smart
Genius level take on Black British history, offering ways in through significant songs from Lord Kitchener to Stormzy via Neneh Cherry, considering their emotional impact and the changes they both reflected and wrought.
Rememberings, Sinead O'Connor
Global icon Sinead O'Connor has lived much of her adult life under public scrutiny, as a musician and an outspoken feminist political figure. Now she tells her side of the story in her inimitable voice.
The Sea Is Not Made of Water: Life Between the Tides, Adam Nicolson
If you like Rachel Carson's Under the Sea Wind (republished this month), you'll want Adam Nicolson's tideline trawl as a companion piece, a tender invitation to comb the very edge of the beach with your eyes and heart.
Tapestries of Life: Uncovering the Lifesaving Secrets of the Natural World, Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson
A book about ecology in its truest sense, looking at how plants, animals and elements intermingle, collaborate and assist each other in a truly astonishing network that we, too, are part of and need.
Unwell Women: A Journey Through Medicine and Myth in a Man-Made World, Elinor Cleghorn
In her tour-de-force history of medicine, Elinor Cleghorn champions the often-unheard women – scientists and patients – who have fought to be heard in a system that condemns them as unwell. Scintillating with righteous, timely fury.
Vivienne Westwood Catwalk, Alexander Fury
A lavish treat celebrating forty years of an endlessly provocative and thought-provoking British designer, from punk to her present-day commitment to sustainability.
Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, Rebecca Hall, illustrated by Hugo Martinez
Rebecca Hall turns not only her research into the untold history of Black women's revolts into a graphic novel, but the process of that research, from threatening archivists at Lloyds to connecting to her grandmother through prayer. Powerful.
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Follow Lolli on Twitter 🐦 @lollieditions & Instagram 📸 @lollieditions.
Hi Denise, first of all: congratulations on the International Man Booker shortlisting for Olga Ravn’s The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, translated by Martin Aitken – great to see the Man Booker judges recognising what we at Burley Fisher have been saying for months! What does that kind of recognition mean for a new small press – and also for a writer translated into English?
Thank you. Burley Fisher has been an early supporter of this book, and of Lolli in general. I honestly don’t know where independent publishers would be without zealous independent booksellers like yourselves.
Being recognised by such a gatekeeper of literature that the Booker Prizes are – and more than that, the five individual judges as well as the entire team who carry out the assiduous work behind the scene – has been a humbling experience. It’s incredibly encouraging for Lolli and the work that we do (there’s six of us). Really, we had our first real publishing season in Autumn 2020, setting the bar for publishing four books a year, a number most commercial publishers would probably sneer at. And yet here we are, just a few months later, with The Employees on the International Booker shortlist.
The exposure the book has received through the prize is at a level we could never have achieved otherwise, in the supersaturated multiverse that is the English-speaking book market. For me personally, as a reader, researcher, translator, editor, and publisher of what we tend to narrowly tag ‘experimental’ fiction, it is terrific to see this book reach a broad audience, and be so well-received. First and foremost, it is a big deal for Olga Ravn and her authorship, and while it is safe to say that Martin Aitken is already known – at least in knowing circles – as one of the most talented translators working from the Danish, this is a precious new feather in his cap. But I think it is also a huge win for innovative writing more broadly. And for small languages. And for small literary presses.
Ravn’s novel is part of a strong strand of your work: bringing novels by award-winning Danish women writers to UK readers. Why did you pick Danish novels in particular? And how would you describe some of the qualities these books share? So far I have: often compact, often surreal, frankly feminist, ambitious, unexpected and unsettling…
I am Danish but have spent most of my adult life engaged with English literature abroad (I’m currently undertaking a PhD in 1960s art novels at UCL). Being able to read Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and German, it feels natural for me to lean in this direction, without the need for readers’ reports or having to rely on prizes. We’ve started collaborating with publishers in the US like Riverhead and New Directions, and while I will keep banging the drum for more Scandinavian authors (who aren’t crime writers!!) to be picked up in the UK and US, this will, over time, mean an increasingly varied list on our end. But for other language areas, I have the same Achilles heel as any other publisher: the inability to read the original book and thus the chance of discovering it first.
I am quite interested in the erratic movements of books; what gets translated, what doesn’t, both historically and in our present moment. I started noticing that precisely my kind of Danish fiction was being, almost immediately, translated into Swedish, German, Dutch, but rarely into English. Enter Lolli! Some publishers seem to think they only have space for one Danish, one Ghanaian, one Maltese writer, as though that is such a defining characteristic, while there is no cap on how many French writers one will publish. Of course many factors and considerations go into this, including the size of the original market, but in general it is unfortunate that fiction from small language areas are almost automatically underrepresented in translation, as is fiction by womxn. There’s work to be done here.
I suppose what I look for in fiction is that jolting experience, which is often achieved when it pushes the boundaries of form to make something of it that is completely its own. Next year we are publishing Swedish author Johanne Lykke Holm’s Strega, in Saskia Vogel’s translation. Strega too draws its own world and asserts its own language, stylistically and narratively. Maybe this is why Lolli books often feel compact, as you put it. Not necessarily in terms of brevity, but in being whole and complete within their own distinctive form. I think this quality is there across Lolli’s list, and makes for a strong coherence, even across genres, be it Emilio Fraia’s novel-of-stories Sevastopol or Signe Gjessing’s poem Tractatus Philosophico-Poeticus, which Denise Newman is currently translating for us. I like when books are like little crystals, but smallness is not a criterion. We have a 480-page novel coming up, in 2023.
As for prizes, I don’t necessarily go after fiction that is award-winning. The Employees did not receive any prizes in Denmark, oddly enough. Prizes and the acknowledgement they bring are no doubt important, but I rely on my own intuition, and frankly, my own literary inclinations. It was clear to me that Olga Ravn was, and is, one of the most important Danish writers of her generation. I didn’t need a prize to affirm that. But now she’s received Politikens Litteraturpris for her latest novel, and of course the accolade of the International Booker nomination.
The Employees took the form of workplace assessments on unnamed human and post-human workers on a spaceship; Adorable designates its characters with initials, is deeply informed by microbiology, and includes conversations with the dead. What is going on here?! As in: this presents such a gorgeous contrast to the still-dominant humanist-realist mode of literary fiction in Britain…
I am drawn to writing that surprises me, that does something unusual, that haunts me long after reading. That makes me want to return. That makes it impossible not to. With The Employees, this happened by the third witness statement, and I can pin it down to this one sentence: ‘In the dream, all the pores of my skin are wide open, and I see that in each one of them there’s a tiny stone.’ This sentence tormented me for weeks; it is so magnetically repellent and therefore strangely attractive. I kept going back to this statement, and, almost crazed, made friends read it.
Ida Marie Hede’s Adorable engages with bodies of/and knowledge and experience in a way I’ve never seen elsewhere. I mean, if any other writer has written so elegantly and engagingly about the gut and the generative properties of bacteria and childbirth within the same work, I’d love to know about it. The tone of the book is very direct and almost talkative, blending the profound with the humorous in a way I find is incredibly affecting. Both of these novels are deeply philosophical, thinking twice about acts we carry out every day, the way we think about the ontology of objects as well as of human subjects, of our own bodies, of our children, but they do it without being didactic. And both are in conversation with other artworks. For me, they have everything I go to fiction for, and then a bit more.
I think it’s not a leap to say that most contemporary Danish writers read internationally and so are influenced from many different directions, precisely because of the country’s smallness. There is little talk of ‘translated fiction’, whereas in the UK readers often either take pride in reading fiction in translation or can be heard saying it isn’t ‘their thing’. In Denmark, it’s understood that of course you read in translation, otherwise you won’t have access to, well, anything that isn’t Danish (unless you speak other languages, of course) – which is a lot!
And absolutely, I think Scandinavian writers are generally less encumbered by a hefty realist tradition, and more concerned with newness, sometimes to a fault (traditionalist furniture would be mid-century furniture rather than Victorian, and an impressive education would not be conducive to Oxbridge but perhaps having attended a good art school that’s hard to get into but still free to attend). Publishers don’t always feel the need to identify whether something is a novel or a short story collection, which is kind of liberating. It’s a smaller market and it just operates differently, it follows its own logic. But I think this is generative towards a sort of progressiveness and creative permissiveness rather than being bogged down by any age-long conventions, and also for a lot of collaboration across art forms. This is not to say the entire literary landscape looks like this, at all. After all, it is also a market profiting enormously on commercial crime fiction. These are just the cherries I’ve picked.
Your books are incredibly beautifully-designed, from the look of the covers to the size and weight. Tell us about that process, who you work with, and why it matters to you.
Thank you! Well, literary fiction is often commercialised to a point where it becomes unrecognisable as art. A good handful of publishers do this well, but in general the UK market is overflowing with trade paperbacks where the cover seems more of an afterthought. I find it quite estrangeing as a reader. I think books mean more to us when the book object itself seems reflective of its status as art.
My intention is for Lolli’s books to sit somewhere between art books and what you might otherwise expect from fiction, and for the interior to be in some sort of conversation with the exterior. Materiality and tactility affect the reading experience. Sometimes this means we need to price our books differently than publishers do in the main, but then I think the kind of reader who is attracted to our books will also be attracted to design and appreciate the material quality of the books. I’m not interested in following any set rules but finding out how things make sense for us. A big inspiration here is Spector Books and the Copenhagen-based publisher Basilisk.
Our key designers are Studio Ard, a Swiss-Danish duo based in Arnold Circus. Before we started working together, they had never worked with a literary press before. Most of their clients are galleries, artists, and the like. This is really meaningful for Lolli: to work with two brilliant designers who come to the novel format with fresh eyes, as designers tout court more than book cover designers. They’ve also created our visual identity, logo, and website. We also collaborate with Laura Silke, Chloe Scheffe, and most recently, Kasper Vang who has designed Jonas Eika’s After the Sun for us.
Likewise, you also seem to work closely with translators! What’s the most important part of the writer-translator-editor-publisher dynamic for you? Where and how do the key conversations happen, and crucial decisions get made?
Our conversations take place in person over coffee when that’s possible, over email, over the phone, on Zoom, in a Google doc on the cloud! Like in any work relationship, mutual trust is vital in these relationships. I’m fortunate to usually be working with translators more than just once – I think this makes it especially meaningful, and to be honest, great fun for a language-obsessed person like me.
A lot of aspects of publishing can be so unrewarding, but for me the translation process isn’t one of them. In fact, it’s probably my favourite aspect – I thoroughly enjoy all the deliberations it entails. It has often been the translators themselves who have pitched the books to us in the first place, and if not, they were in some way or other simply the right person to turn to for that project, or already associated with the book or author via the agent.
You joined Twitter quite recently: how are you finding being a publisher in a digital era (and hyper-digital moment)? What connections or encounters have you had via the internet – including your digital subscription?
Thankfully it is my brilliant colleague Anja who is taking care of our Twitter. I’m not much of a tweeting bird myself. I think Instagram was, for the first while, really how most readers discovered us. I’m just barely a millennial, but my heart is sort of not, ha! I turn to like-minded friends, colleagues, libraries, and my favourite bookstores for finding books and authors I will like, and not to what’s ‘trending’ on Twitter or Instagram. But, as Lolli was really born digital-native, I think we are very much of that hyper-digital moment you mention. Even if some have complained that we don’t really do e-books, and perhaps that would argue against Lolli being so digitally savvy. I just think something is lost if the kind of books we publish are read on a screen. It’s proven that reading physical books activates other areas of the brain. While I like to take pictures of books for Instagram and whatnot, I want to read them physically. We already spend far too much time in front of screens.
One of our authors discovered us through Instagram and got in touch after that. Especially because we focus on fiction in translation, it is vital to have this opportunity for contact and discovery across distances. And bookshops and readers! We’ve discovered, and been discovered by, so many amazing bookshops through Instagram, and it’s a pleasure to hear what readers think about our books over an informal DM exchange.
And what difference do bricks and mortar bookstores make for you? Especially given it’s sometimes depicted as a struggle to engage readers with translated fiction (spoiler: it’s not). How do you get booksellers hyped about your titles?
Every difference. Discovery. Recommendations from your trusted bookseller. A community around reading. A city without bookstores run by passionate people would be like a pool without water.
It’s always been the strangest thing for me, this talk about either being down with translated fiction or not. I’m glad to hear you’re finding that it’s actually not a struggle! But then Burley Fisher also has the best clientele. If someone rejects fiction in translation, they’re not just rejecting entire worlds, but the world. I mean, imagine an avid reader from the Netherlands or Argentina or Serbia saying ‘nope, I don’t read fiction from the English-speaking world’.
The best we can do, I think, is to put our books in the hands of booksellers and hope that they like what we do!
With things opening up safely, we’re delighted to announce that we’re throwing our BFDay21 Festival, and everyone’s invited. We’ll celebrate by showcasing some of our favourite indie publishers and writers with a live weekend programme of readings, discussions, workshops, parties… and, of course, bookselling.
Please wear a mask while indoors at the festival to help make the event safe and accessible for everyone.
BSL interpretation by Link Hearing will be available on demand throughout the festival. If you need interpretation, please email us webshop[at]burleyfisherbooks[dot]com, letting us know the specific session/s you're planning to attend so we can confirm.
What: #BFDay21, a weekend celebrating Burley Fisher Books & indie lit
When: Friday 15 October 7pm-10.30 pm, Saturday 16 October 10.30am-10.30pm
Where: St Peter De Beauvoir Town, Northchurch Terrace, Hackney, London N1 4DA [Google pin]
Volunteers from the De Beauvoir Association will be in Café in the Crypt with hot beverages and homemade snacks to raise funds for De Beauvoir Welcomes Refugees. Bring change to help make change! Sat 16 Oct, 12-4.45 pm.
We'll also have a contemplative outside-indoors space created by Ignota Books and a Cafe OTO book table in Cafe in the Crypt on Saturday.
How to book:
Event time | Event details | |
Fri 15 Oct, 7-8pm, crypt |
Open Pen Novelette Showcase with Bonny Brooks, Sarah Manvel and Morgan Omotoye, compèred by Fernando Sdrigotti | Free! |
Fri 15 Oct, 8-9pm, crypt | #YourNextBook Live with Brixton Review of Books, with Jen Calleja, Lauren Elkin and Yara Rodrigues Fowler, chaired by Catherine Taylor | Book now, £5 |
Sat 16 Oct, 10.30-11.30am, crypt |
Flying Eye Family Festival Fun: hands-on excitement for all with Flying Eye. Children 3+ welcome with accompanying adults.
10.30-11.30am — Michael Holland, I Ate Sunshine for Breakfast 11.30am-12.30pm – Madeleine Finlay, Beetles for Breakfast |
Free! |
Sat 16 Oct, 12-1pm, main hall |
Embodying the Essay with Alice Hattrick, Amber Husain and Adam Zmith, chaired by Rebecca Liu |
Book now, £5 |
Sat 16 Oct, 1-2pm, crypt |
Getting Into Translation with Antonia Lloyd-Jones and Nichola Smalley, chaired by Anna Aslanyan |
Book now, £5 |
Sat 16 Oct, 1.30-2.30pm, main hall |
New Fictions, Hybrid Writing with Mona Arshi and Juliet Jacques, chaired by Nisha Ramayya |
Book now, £5 |
Sat 16 Oct, 3-4pm, main hall |
New Fiction, Real Londons with Tice Cin, Frankie Miren and Gboyega Odubanjo, chaired by Will Harris |
Book now, £5 |
Sat 16 Oct, 4-5pm, crypt |
Getting Published with Gary Budden (Influx) and Jenn Thompson (Cipher), chaired by Robert Greer |
Book now, £5 |
Sat 16 Oct, 4.30-5.30pm, main hall |
We <3 Short Stories with Alice Ash, Vanessa Onwuemezi and Gemma Seltzer, chaired by Chris Power |
Book now, £5 |
Sat 16 Oct, 5-6pm, crypt | Food for All with Thomas Walker (Hackney School of Food) | Free! |
Sat 16 Oct, 6-7.30pm, main hall |
Speaking Truth to Power: Elif Shafak in Conversation with Patrice Lawrence |
Book now, £10 |
Sat 16 Oct, 8-9pm, crypt |
Bodies in the Crypt with Nicholas Royle and Alison Rumfitt, chaired by Gareth Evans |
Book now, £5 |
Sat 16 Oct, 8-9pm, main hall |
Poetry Showcase with Anthony Anaxagorou, Will Harris, Daisy Lafarge, Holly Pester, Nisha Ramayya, Peter Scalpello and Stephanie Sy-Quia, hosted by Rachael Allen |
Book now, £7 |
Image © BF Collective
In order to welcome everyone, we’ll be relocating temporarily to our beautiful local church, St Peter De Beauvoir Town: a fully wheelchair-accessible, eco-conscious venue with three wonderful event spaces. We’ll be hosting all our readings and discussions in the roomy main hall, all our workshops in the atmospheric crypt, and an entirely free pick n’ mix programme in the side space.
All events will be BSL interpreted. Readings will be recorded and made available subsequently via Burley Fisher’s Isolation Station podcast
We are proud to be partnering with nine publishers whose authors and books we’ve loved and celebrated over the last five years. They are: And Other Stories, Cipher, Fitzcarraldo, Granta Poetry, Ignota, Influx, Open Pen, Peninsula, Serpent’s Tail.
Here are responses to the event from some of our publisher partners —
“Honoured. And five years, wowser. That went quick.” Sean Preston, Open Pen
“A super extraordinary and exciting prospect! For so many reasons – to celebrate you all, drinking, to being around people.” Rachael Allen, Granta Poetry
“Wow, we could not be more excited about all this, yes to everything, yes to it all.” Jenn Thompson, Cipher Press
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