Inpress Blog

A Tribute to H.R.F. Keating

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:13:54 +0100

Peter and Margaret Lewis pay tribute to H.R.F. Keating, who died last weekend.

We first heard Harry Keating reading from his manuscript of Jack, the Lady Killer at Dove Cottage in Grasmere. It was a suitably literary setting for someone who was always a fine practitioner of the English language. Flambard Press published this crime novel in verse a year later in 1999. Many readers were quickly engrossed by the fast-moving narrative with its Indian Raj setting and forgot that it was a poem.

Keating had previously published a book of short stories with Flambard, In Kensington Gardens Once... in 1997. These gentle crime stories show the keenly observant eye and humour that was often evident in his more mainstream crime fiction.

Although Flambard played a very small part in his distinguished literary career, we were very pleased to be able add him to our list. He was a friend for many years and his kindly presence will be very much missed in literary gatherings.

Mortal Morning: An Interview with Brian Aldiss

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 12:12:01 +0100

Kerry Lagan interviews science fiction legend and poet Brian Aldiss about his new Flambard Press collection, Mortal Morning.

What does the term ‘Mortal Morning’ signify for you?

It's a piece of onomatopoeia, which is attractive, yet there is much contrast between the hopeful 'morning' and the less hopeful 'mortal'. A good functional title, easy to pronounce and possibly memorable.

How long have you spent working on this collection?

The collection has simply accumulated. ‘At the Caligula Hotel’ was written long ago, possibly in the sixties. A selection of my poems were published in 1995, entitled At the Caligula Hotel. The poems about favourite artists are only two or three years old, and were designed to accompany my pictorial imitations of the authors involved, for a Christmas gift booklet I sent to friends, entitled You're Getting Terribly Blonde Lately. The various poems elicited by my wife's illness and death date from 1998. Antigone's song, ‘Who knows where my thoughts may lead me’, comes from my opera, Oedipus on Mars (still unperformed). One or two poems have Greek origins; ‘Monemvasia’ was put together there, and on more than one occasion. Of course, several poems have scientific backgrounds. 'Flight 063' for instance.

Would you attribute a certain mood or motif to Mortal Morning?

Most are simply serious, some didactic. Yes, but some are humorous. I write when I have something to say – perhaps a new perception. Much as many of my short stories materialise from obscure mental coastlines.

With such a long-spanning career, do you still feel excited about producing new work?

Writing is such a pleasure – a labour, but a distinct pleasure. When you wake in the morning and sit on the side of the bed, scratching yourself, instead of thinking that your back hurts or your legs ache, you have a little inspiration, ‘Oh, yes, after that line about the moth you ought to say – so and so...’ and you feel terribly pleased, because the act of creation, however small, is always pleasing. You go downstairs, get yourself a mug of coffee and switch on the Apple.

How does the cover painting incorporate what this collection is about?

Search me. I just thought it was a jolly, rather grand isolée. Isolées are what I do. Colourful.

Which poem was your most challenging to create?

'April in East Coker', perhaps, where T S Eliot is buried. I knew Eliot.

Do any particular visual artists inspire your poetry?

Gauguin, G B Tiepolo, Kandinsky. I've been crazy about all three at various periods. Gauguin in particular. The recent exhibition at Tate Modern revived my old feeling for him.

Which is your favourite poem in Mortal Morning?

The Cat improvement Co. I had it made into a poster. Or maybe the Gauguin poem.

What is your view on the current state of science-fiction literature and film?

Too childish, much of it, and much of it too violent. But I'm afloat from it and not really a good judge any more (as I was when I wrote Billion Year Spree). But look out for clever Finches of Mars, due for next year, I believe.

Mortal Morning is available to pre-order now.

Planes, Trains & Automobiles: Inpress goes to Futurebook

Wed, 1 Dec 2010 12:12:48 +0100

My train back to the frozen North out of King’s Cross last night wasn’t just cancelled, it was "declared a failure". Instant mental image of a station guard standing on the platform berating the engine for making bad life decisions, but luckily we were all shunted over to another train, and to the chorus of falling ice below the train and the smell of burnt rubber from all the brake-checking along the way, we made it. Much hilarity in the carriage, too, proving that though us Brits are famed for our whinging prowess, when the proverbial really does hit the fan, we can all still have a good chuckle about our country’s colossal failure to deal with wintry conditions in winter, or about Man U losing 4-0.

Futurebook was definitely worth the hassle, Tube strikes and all. All the big players were there and at their grand-standing best, but there was also space for insight into the potential of digital in smaller businesses. And all the techies were refreshingly sensible enough to recognise the continuing importance of physical product - that clouds and xml workflows and granular content are part of reading’s expansion, not its demise. Faber Digital and Scholastic showed just how many avenues of storytelling digital has already opened up: the latter with its Horrible Histories brand, where the consumer is now on the cusp of full immersion into one of its Virtual Worlds of learning. When I was a kid I had Gordon the Gopher.

And the tech is now catching up with the potential. Amazingly, 13% of tablet-owners now already have a second device in their household, and this will surely continue as more brands launch next year and drive price down. I was always a bit skeptical about iPad – thinking of it more as an object of display than one of genuine usability (it’s a giant iPhone, without the Phone), but two things at Futurebook changed my mind. One was the stat that iPad took only 28 days to sell 1 million units (iPod took around 360 days). The other was The Elements. Created by Touch Press, it’s an app of the periodic table. Yawn, yes? But take it from an English graduate, it made me interested in science again for the first time since I unceremoniously dumped it all after GCSEs. To take something so dry and unfathomable in text form, and then to animate, relativise, even fetishise it for the modern world is a pretty amazing feat. And Touch Press’ next app-venture is with Faber early next year, so hopefully poetry is about to get the same treatment - something with a bit of bite and depth below all the glamour.

Bendithion: A Pushcart Prize Winning Essay About Wales and an Extraordinary Friendship

Mon, 1 Nov 2010 14:14:28 +0100

Here's the introduction to the Pushcart Prize-winning essay Bendithion by Harrison Solow, whose genre-defying novel Felicity and Barbara Pym is now available from Cinnamon Press.

Vulcans have an inner eyelid. In one of the episodes of Star Trek, Mr. Spock is invaded by a fatal parasite on a remote planet. Exposure to high-intensity light appears to be the only cure—a treatment that would blind humans. Because of Vulcan physiology, however, a hidden ocular membrane descends to shut out intrusive rays, and Spock emerges intact, undamaged by his contact with an alien world.

It turns out that y Cymry [The Welsh] have an inner eyelid as well. More like an obfuscatory veil than a solid barricade, it allows the Welsh to see out, but effectively shades the inner self from the eyes of the inquisitive, casting all that is behind it in shadow. It is a dusky looking-glass, presented innocently enough to the stranger, deceptively luminous and reflective, its transparency clearly controlled by time and measured, in nanobytes, by trust.

To read the rest of the essay, click here.

National Poetry Day: Our Competition Winner

Thu, 7 Oct 2010 16:16:14 +0100

Congratulations to Sue Kindon, winner of our National Poetry Day competition with this little gem about teenage rebellion and mothers in the home.

Some of us had mothers:
not so as you’d notice -
we kept them to ourselves,
refusing everything but faddy salads,
getting shirty if they dared
so much as iron our cheesecloth smocks.

We didn’t give them a barefoot thought,
slamming the lot behind don’t fuss front doors
as we scampered off, with feral sleeping bags,
thumbing it to festivals, all you need is
getting high on flowerpower smoke,
our clean beds waiting with the sheets turned back.

Some of us had mothers
when they were out of fashion.
Once I passed mine in the street.
But when the times a-changed and I silver-trailed home,
slinking up the garden path on the stroke of midnight,
how I feasted on the honeysuckle of her curtained light.

Do I Like That: Sport versus Poetry

Tue, 13 Jul 2010 16:16:20 +0100

On the face of it, sports and poetry don't exactly go together – that bit in the middle of any Venn diagram would be pretty slight indeed. One of the reasons may just be that they’re more and more associated with opposite ends of the linguistic scale. For every example of Coleridge’s “best words in the best order” we get from poetry, there’s an over-paid, over-hyped footballer you-knowing his way through the usual array of clichés and platitudes, Brian. More recently, there’ll always be something cringe-worthy about the visual poetry of this year’s incredible and highly significant World Cup being reduced to a series of bland abstract nouns (‘passion’, ‘commitment’, ‘intensity’) from a certain Alan ‘Time and Time Again’ Hansen… (This was, let's remember, a tournament on which a mild-mannered octopus named Paul made more sense than anyone!)

On the other hand, sport has thrown up some of the most innovative and downright bizarre turns of phrase imaginable, often leaving our own language indecipherable. A cricket fan may know exactly what’s going on when a tail-ender backward cuts a wrong-un straight to silly point, but good luck explaining that to the uninitiated this summer. You might as well stick a copy of The Faerie Queen in their carry-on.

But the word poetry, of course, doesn’t always mean, to borrow a word from this week’s Bookseller, “high-falutin’”. A series of high-profile adverts during the World Cup by a certain fast-food chain used poetry to connect with its football-loving/avoiding customers: Roger McGough as read by Graham Taylor. And it worked a treat. Sharp, crystallised but never inaccessible language twisting and turning around a common theme, funny and pertinent – do I like that!

And if you like your reading laced up and doused in liniment, be sure to check out our range of Sport titles.

A Tribute to Alan Plater

Tue, 29 Jun 2010 12:12:33 +0100

A tribute to the late Alan Plater (1935-2010) from Ann Cotterrell, who published Plater's memoir Doggin' Around, a book he called the "memoirs of a jazz-crazed playwright."

Alan Plater, who died on 25th June, was well-known as a superb writer for television, radio and the theatre. His wit, gift for dialogue and empathy with the lives and language of ordinary people gave him a distinctive voice, which also resounded with his love of jazz.

The only full-length biography of Plater is his own book about his life, and this centres around his love of jazz and the use he makes of jazz as a key component in his work. He first approached Northway with a collection of his previously published articles about jazz and suggested a compendium of reprints. While I was delighted to meet someone whose work I admired so much, I thought that this book would work much better if it were rewritten as a continuous autobiographical work. We did not hear from him for a while and assumed that he might have done a lot of work and taken it to a bigger publisher for a much better return than we could offer.

I had misjudged him. He contacted us again saying that he had finished the book. It was a wonderful manuscript. I read it on a plane while going on holiday and probably looked like a dangerously demented woman grinning at Alan's recollections and beautifully turned sentences. There was barely any editing to do. Not only that: the book included his lyrics and cartoons. He prided himself as a playwright in leaving space for the actors to perform and his drawings too are clear and witty with no excess lines.

Doggin' Around had also been the title of one of his television plays. Perhaps Alan and I were both unbelievably naive but neither of us recognised that the title had sexual connotations until we were well into the publishing process. He then considered changing it, but decided, unsurprisingly and with some humour, to keep the title regardless.

Alan loved Ronnie Scott's and he and Shirley Rubinstein held their wedding reception in the club. In Doggin' Around he tells a story about Ronnie in 1989: "The BBC celebrated the club's thirtieth anniversary with a documentary and I was interviewed as part of the programme ... I said: 'There's only thing that could spoil it. A single shaft of sunlight.'

A couple of weeks later we were in the club and Ronnie displayed, by his standards, an enormous outpouring of emotion.

'Hey, that was really nice what you said.'

Later a bottle of champagne arrived at our table with the message: there'll be another one in thirty years time. Then, a few days later, I received a gold membership card in the post, entitling us to free admission for life. If that isn't a special relationship, I don't know what is; and there was much more as the years passed by."

His plays focusing on jazz include The Beiderbecke Trilogy and The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, the latter shown on television with an all-star cast including Judi Dench and Cleo Laine in 2000, followed in 2006 by a stage play about jazzwomen during World War Two, The Blonde Bombshells of 1943. But Plater also wrote lyrics and spoke on stage about jazz, as evidenced by two wonderful CDs of his work with Alan Barnes, Songs for Unsung Heroes and The Seven Ages of Jazz.

One of many major problems in the publishing world is that books have to appear on the shelves of one department in a bookshop. Doggin' Around is about jazz and drama and it is an autobiography. It defies the bookshop categorisation, just as he defied any pigeonholing: lyricist, dramatist, screenwriter, novelist, wit, socialist, architect and cartoonist. And yet, more than any of these, he was someone who showed great warmth and understanding of human emotions whether expressed through words or jazz. And most of all, he could communicate these emotions, like the best writers and musicians, to people from a whole range of backgrounds and levels of sophistication, with deceptive simplicity and great subtlety.

A handshake across the continents: introducing Stephen Derwent Partington

Thu, 3 Jun 2010 16:16:19 +0100

An introduction to Kenya by poet Stephen Derwent Partington, whose new collection How to Euthanise a Cactus, published by Cinnamon Press, is available to pre-order now.

Unlike Out of Africa’s Karen Blixen, I do not presume to have a settler ‘farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills’, although I do live within view of them, and squat on someone else’s farm (my father-in-law's). I could have waved to Blixen from here, but suspect I might have given a somewhat different hand signal. Still, I’m afraid that I also like aspects of urban living, including Nairobi, which is just down the road.

In my first few years in Kenya, I was perhaps a little arrogant, and possibly still am. Fact is, I used to hear many members of my Kenyan family and acquaintances complain about how the mainstream Western media reported Africa in general, and Kenya in particular. Their concerns were pretty standard: that the Western media treated Africa like a single country, culturally defoliating its diversity; that this imaginary Kingdom was always only represented as a hopeless pit of disease, ‘tribal’ violence, and corruption. Even where I could sometimes see their point, I tended to yawn, ignorantly.

And where the media wasn’t perceived to be condemnatory, it – along with tour firms, creative writers and artists – patronisingly romanticised Kenya as a place teeming with exotic flora and fauna, noble Maasai, stunning beaches and pith-helmeted adventure. In this version of Kenya, Kenyans barely appeared.

What I once took to be caginess and criminal dismissal, I now see as valid and urgent concerns. It is, as ever, to do with information, humility and empathy – not sympathy, no: we already have too much of that! Whether through immersion and engagement with texts or with people other than the Kenyan elite, commentators must be informed. I’m not entirely sure after almost ten years that I’ve managed this yet, any more than a Brit in the UK can be fully informed about that island, or a lifelong Kenyan can be fully informed about this country. I’d be the last to suggest that I’ve achieved any protean ‘hybridity’, the cosmopolitan ability to morph-and-merge into the two national identities that now, amongst others, inhere in me: the ‘British’ and the ‘Kenyan’ - two nationalities that have a very violent, exploitative and unequal relationship in (post)colonial history. But I’d claim, like any diligent pupil, that I’m trying.

One consequence of this effort – and hopefully some small proof of it – is my forthcoming 2010 poetry collection, How to Euthanise a Cactus. My accidental and my intended audiences are at least twofold, perhaps like my identity: certainly, if you’re reading this blog in the UK, Kenya, or elsewhere, you’re a very welcome part of it, and I should like my poems to be a contested tug-of-peace between us all.

I think therefore iPad

Fri, 28 May 2010 11:11:31 +0100

With the boss away at BookExpo in New York this past week, time for an Inpress blog with a North American twist.

For someone who's lived in Canada, May giving way to June can only mean one thing: the finals of the NHL ice hockey season. For those of you who’ve never seen it before, imagine the grace and brutality of rugby, on skates, with sticks. And a list of teams, mostly American, whose host cities – San Jose, Anaheim, Phoenix(!) – only ever see the frozen stuff in their beer-coolers. But I digress. The reason I mention demon sport on this literary site is that – while watching coverage of the finals through the wonders of the interweb – I noticed the North American advert for a little something called an iPad.

Now ads over there are like the opposite of our buses: they come along far too regularly and far too often. In one game, nestled in amongst the hammer-blows for health insurance and Zero Trans Fat fast food, the same iPad ad ran six or seven times. But every time it did, I could feel every sinew of snipey British cynicism give way to pure, unadulterated iwantoneofthose excitement.

The cornerstone of Apple’s success is the breadth of appeal of their products. The iPod changed music consumption forever for younger generations (remember MiniDiscs? Exactly.) The iPhone has reached out and grabbed a previously technophobic set of adults, who now bask in the glow of their so-called middle youth and wow their kids with their understanding of apps. And the iPad is the natural extension of that nabbing of older audiences, especially when it comes to books. “More books than you could possibly imagine…” screamed the ad, and despite the slightly hokey Star Wars copy, they’re right. Fed up of selecting which books to cram into your holiday hand-luggage? Prefer to read in large print without taking out a library card? Want to out-tech your own kids? E-books are the answer.

Down the Figure 7: a review

Mon, 17 May 2010 11:11:15 +0100

"You believed, at ten years old, that the world was infinitely beautiful, mysterious, terrifying; a place of dark wonder, cruelty, and boredom."

Trevor Hoyle’s ‘fictional memoir’ tells the tale of young Terry Webb, a Lancashire lad growing up in the 1950s, either side of the dreaded 11+. Think Brasso, Ovaltine and gaslamps. A time when you stood for the Anthem in the cinema. When it was a proud moment to be “in a house that actually had a hallway behind the door”. Made up of equal parts biography, local history, adventure yarn and Kes-style coming-of-age tale, Down the Figure 7 vividly recreates the Britain that won the war but lost the peace, and a new generation of boys that could never achieve the valour and acclaim of Churchill and Monty’s Men.

Imagine a Famous Five for troublemakers, where the ham sandwiches and all that ginger ale are replaced by mud pies and decapitated pigeons – George and Timmy by ‘Simple Annie’ and ‘Mad Johnnie Johnson’. It’s a grubby and often malicious Facts of Life: dealing with bullies at school and in the street, paying the price for straying onto a rival gang’s turf, having a shiny new red bike on one page only to have it nicked on the next. And, of course, there’s the maddening rush of sexuality and the discovery of “girls and their wiles and snares”.

My personal highlight though was the book’s third section, where Terry makes it into the local High School, a torturous place “where everyone was a curt surname” and you’d get put in detention by a chemistry teacher with a face “like a badly preserved Easter Island statue”. Here the plot-pace also gathers real speed, as Terry’s Desert Rat Uncle Jack appears on the scene and helps the lads stage their own El Alamein, over the most prized possession of all in Denby: their stash of Guy Fawkes Night firewood…

At the London Book Fair...

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:13:03 +0100

Earl’s Court was not-so-strangely subdued, what with all the disruption caused by a not-so-subdued Icelandic volcano. Still, there was a tangible sense of mucking in and getting through, and still lots to see and do. E-books were of course at the forefront, and there seemed to be as many stalls offering ‘digital solutions’ as there were physical booksellers. I saw my first iPad, cruelly separated from eager fingers by a glass cabinet. I also saw a pirate, a Viking and a wizard, and I’m still not too sure why. There was a Caribbean cook singing into her radio mic over her stove of delicious-smelling roti. There was a gaggle of 7-minute masseuses, all dressed in white, angels of R&R.

Personal highlights include a talk on IndieBound, an American initiative that has bolstered independent bookselling in the States despite the subprime bust, appealing to community spirit through some fine, outrageous and truly liberating marketing. IndieBound starts up on these shores in the coming weeks. And then there was the Inpress event at Foyles on the Tottenham Court Road, featuring poets Fleur Adcock and Andrew Forster.

Andrew Forster was first to read: giving the audience a glimpse of his new collection Territory. Exploring themes of isolation and reclamation, of our attempts to civilise the wild and unruly, these are poems whose sibilant rhythms demand to be read aloud. Set largely in south-west Scotland, this is a Territory of passing places, disused narrow-gauge railways and winds off the Solway Firth, where the dormant powers of nature are waiting to ‘explode’ and reveal ‘the earth stripped to its nerves’. In a week dominated by a mountain and a glacier in Europe’s back-of-beyond, it couldn’t have been more resonant.

Then came the poems of family and childhood from Fleur Adcock's Dragon Talk, filled with the sardonic yet warming humour that only families share and provoke, and for which she is possibly best known. These spiky gems drew many a knowing chuckle; all were bound by a sense of trying to make sense of the world, or in the words of her 3-year-old self, ‘life’s mysterious but I’m used to that’. The collection moves through the demolition and dislocation of World War II Britain, then teenage years in New Zealand, before finally landing on the joys of grand- and great-grand-motherhood, of a new generation captured ‘in mid-scamper’ by Skype on the other side of the world.

Interview with Richard Aronowitz - The bitter end

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:16:34 +0100

Our first ever Inpress Virtual Book Tour is coming to an end, and what better way to finish than with an interview with the man himself, Richard Aronowitz, talking about his novel's own shocking climax.

1) In his recent article in The Independent, Tom Sutcliffe talks about how the novel ends “in a place that one in ten thousand of [its] readers will have predicted”. How do you react to that?

I think that my novel’s ending is the ineluctable result of its narrative arc and I cannot see how else the book could have ended. I believe that there are clues to be found along the way. It is interesting to note that Tom Sutcliffe himself says that he knew the outcome well in advance of the ending, so he must be his one in ten thousand. Didn’t T.S. Eliot write that “In my beginning is my end”? That is certainly true with my book, if you look closely enough.

2) With your novel specifically, which came first: the twist or the whole?

The majority of the whole came well before I had any idea at all about John Stack’s ‘problem’. Once it had dawned on me, far into the first draft, that the novel’s central protagonist was an unreliable narrator, I redrafted the manuscript accordingly.

3) In the novel, the final twist depends less on simple shock tactics, “big-dipper jolts” as Tom Sutcliffe calls them, and more on its gradual seeping into the narrative. Did you enjoy laying out the clues to the reader, or did you worry that all the foreshadowing might tip him/her over the edge?

I enjoyed laying out the clues for the reader, and was egged on to add in even more clues to the mix by various early readers of the manuscript, who found the outcome of the novel too shocking a dénouement for their tastes without a wider dégustation of bite-size clues peppering the story along the way.

4) When it comes to films, The Sixth Sense is famed and often parodied for its ending; and in Fight Club the twist is signalled, signposted as ‘the changeover’. Do you think the instant twists and turns that cinema offers has made us more shock-hungry when it comes to novels? And what about the risk of cliché?

I think that there is always the risk of cliché with such “Didn’t you guess?” endings, and strongly believe that the novel has a great deal more to offer –particularly in terms of its style and language– to the reader than its ‘reveal’. I also think that there is always the appetite for plots that have a twist, because such twists make the viewer or the reader reappraise their perception and understanding of what they have just witnessed. It could well be that this desire in the reader for shocks comes from the increased prevalence of filmic twists of this type, which whets their appetite for a similar thing in fiction.

Buy It's Just the Beating of My Heart.

It's Just the Beating of My Heart by Richard Aronowitz: A Review

Wed, 7 Apr 2010 11:11:29 +0100

John Stack isn’t exactly the rocky pillar of society his name would suggest: his wife’s left him, taking their daughter with her, and his once high-end London art gallery is now awash with pieces that would be better suited as landfill.

It’s Just the Beating of My Heart is a solidly existential, at times gruelling mid-life crisis of a novel. It reminded me of a kind of upper-crust Jimmy McGovern drama (think stalking with opera glasses) – the Lakes here replaced by a quaint Gloucestershire valley, as we peer unerringly into what lies beneath the untouched beauty of the countryside. In reality, this is a place where the redeeming qualities of Art, nature and even newfound love with a widowed neighbour are blotted out by the effects of alcohol and painful suspicion.

“It is that narrative voice again, that ghost in the machine telling you endless bad things about yourself.”

That narrative voice comes shot through with streaks of Sunset Boulevard, as the woman in the big house brings not the promise of redemption we have come to expect from such free spirits, but its own stream of turmoil and paranoia for our unhinged narrator. And it’s the way in which this darker side seeps almost imperceptibly into the story of second-chance romance that is so compelling, and powerful.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. There’s humour in there, too – witness the sideswipes at status-driven popular culture: the school-mums and their 4x4s for one; the astronomic rise of the TV talent show; the interplay between too-much-too-young daughter and too-old-too-fast father. If you like your fiction pressing, well-written and distinctly uncosy, with a clever sting in the tail, then it’s well worth the read.

Iron Press editor Peter Mortimer on long distance writing

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:23:58 +0100

I'm not sure who wrote the world's quickest book. Jack Kerouac is reputed to have knocked out On The Road in pretty fast time, typing directly onto a toilet roll. His rate of knots was, however, enhanced by certain chemical substances. As for the longest - Marcel Proust sent most of his life (a lot of it in bed) writing A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, making somewhat irrelevant that question often asked of authors, "so what are you working on now?" Marcel can be excused such a time span, as the mighty tome stretches to more than one million words. Few readers get past Swann's Way (including myself).

I can offer no such reasons for the pre-publication life-span of my own new work, a novella of only 21,000 words. I began the first draft of Uninvited in 1970, and it will be published next month. I'm the sad kind of person who likes juggling meaningless statistics, and have worked out that the productivity rate over these 40 years has been under two words a day. Having said that, there were days when the muse had me by the scruff of the neck and I furiously scribbled down a full paragraph. After which I would collapse in a state of mental exhaustion on the bed.

The speed of modern technology is such that a writer has to tweak any work whose creation covers such a time span. In draft one my main character (who arrives home to fund an unknown stranger has moved into his house) watches a black and white television. There are no home computers or mobile phones, and one of the man's favourite meals is fried liver, which no-one now eats. I expect the book to emerge blinking into a strange world it may not recognise. Most of it I can no longer remember writing, but suppose I must have.

Uninvited is published in May by Red Squirrel Press.

The Route Book at Bedtime: A Review

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 17:17:33 +0100

“Nothing’s real in this place, I reckon. Everything’s a performance, a place where truths are masked, words spoken without being said.”

In this modern age of tweets and wall-posts, where it’s concision not content that counts, it’s great to find a collection of short fiction that carries both. In the twelve short stories that make up The Route Book at Bedtime, we get the full canon of human experience filtered down to dreamily intimate ten-minute reads. We get the agony and the ecstasy of it all: from playschool through mid-life crises to the end of days, from small towns where everyone knows everyone to the anonymity of the Big City. We also see relationships in all their forms, beginning, flourishing, failing, ending.

Like dreams, some of the stories represent leaps of escape from the daily grind. In Cally Taylor’s ‘Imagination Avenue’, there’s a neat twist on the outbreak shocker, in which a street succumbs not to H1NI or even the Rage virus, but instead to a light-hearted dusting of neighbourhood frivolity, a residents’ backlash against “rubbish adult stuff” like gardening and microwave meals for one. And Sam Duda’s ‘The Parrot’ is a delightfully uncatchable road-trip tale of beaches, bird-sitting and tombstoning that sits somewhere between Fear and Loathing and The Old Man and the Sea.

At times, of course, dreams turn to nightmare, as in the opening story by Pippa Griffin, which chronicles the cold reality of an adolescent ‘Crush’ gone sour. And at the other end of the age spectrum, the final story, ‘Smoke and Dust’ by MY Alam is the real, crushing stand-out here, a two-time narrative on mortality that brilliantly captures the generational gap between those miners of yesteryear and us minors who will never set foot in a pit.

If you’re still yet to experience the joys and growing significance of the short story, you’d struggle to find a better place to start.

Iron Press editor Peter Mortimer on this week's literary news

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:13:22 +0100

A news item catches the eye: Russia apparently is making no special arrangements to mark the hundredth anniversary of the death of Tolstoy, despite celebrations elsewhere. One Russian writer said, "all Russians read now is trash - and usually western trash."

How things change. Little over twenty years ago, in the admittedly highly repressive regime of the Soviet Union, good reading was a natural and accepted activity. In 1987, Raduga Press of Moscow published a hardback book (in Russian) called The Poets of Northern England, with myself and Durham poet S.J. Litherland acting as UK advisors. We had visited the country, and made contact with a good many writers. All the leading contemporary poets from our region were featured. The print run was 10,000, and the book sold out in the USSR in less than a week, despite readers having heard of very few of the authors.

Four years later, with the Soviet system collapsing, Iron Press brought out our reciprocal The Poetry of Perestroika, featuring forty of the new wave poets by then being given much more freedom in the age of Glasnost. The print run of 1,000 was pretty impressive for a UK poetry title. It sold well, but we still have copies.

No sensible person wants a return to the totalilitarianism of the USSR. But I think of those Russians now, surrounded by all that freedom, reading all that junk.

Peter Mortimer

A poem for John Rety

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:16:18 +0100

A poem by Robert Ilson, which he read at the recent memorial event for John Rety, who sadly passed away last month.

Rety on Parnassus

“Üdvözlöm, Janos!” “Ave, Johannes!” “Ni Hao?”
Greet Li-Po, Virgil, Petöfi their peer
Lately arrived upon the Muses’ summit
Who straight inclining downwards strains to view
Our century as was. Loth to abandon
That stew he knew so amplier than most
And pass an eon playing games with stanzas
In safety, he would rather share with us
Our fraught illusions and our puny hopes
And hoist us in his great compassion’s net.
What though when here he winked at us at times
And joked us through our and his sadness? Who
More trustworthy than he to bear the lines
Extracted from his sublunary bards
All the way to the Agora of print?
I wish him back, that useful gentleman,
Yet would not stretch him out a moment longer
Upon the rack whereon he lay with us.
Let him repose now in an upland dell
With naught to contemplate except the sun
And the broad patience of the summer air.

Robert Ilson

Iron Press editor Peter Mortimer at a brand new litfest

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:10:18 +0100

Those bewailing the state of British publishing needed to be at De Montfort Universty in Leicester last weekend. A day-long event called States of Independence featured no fewer than forty presses, none of them remotely corporate or multi-national.

Over the years I’ve attended several small press festivals where editors spend all day behind tables staring at one another across an empty room before going home. On Saturday, more than 500 people flocked into the Clephan Building, most producing the folding stuff at the stalls, and attendances were healthy at the twenty-plus talks by authors and editors held throughout the building.

The organiser was that stalwart Ross Bradshaw, editor of Five Leaves Publications, who was on hand to meet all publishers and speakers, and provided them with a special chill-out room. Each participant was given a free meal voucher for the nearby café. Good heavens – a small press event that was well organised! It was free for all the publishers too – London Book Fair please note. New authors mixed with such established names as Berlie Doherty, and the presses strutting their stuff ranged from old lags such as myself to such interesting aspirants as Weathervane and Nine Arches.

One curio; among the talks I attended was one by Lynne Patrick, editor of Crème de la Crime, billed as "probably the only female crime publisher in the country". She was in conversation with one of her authors Chris Nickson - who turned out to be a bloke.

Pete Mortimer

Carrying Poems around Edinburgh

Mon, 1 Mar 2010 13:13:33 +0100

Nestled in neatly behind Canongate Street in Edinburgh is the Scottish Poetry Library, central hub to the "Carry a Poem" movement that has been sweeping through the world's first ever UNESCO City of Literature.

Walking round the city, you could find poetry from all walks of life and schools of literary thinking: Robert Burns, G.K. Chesterton, Douglas Dunn and Edward Lear were just some of the names I spotted. And in all kinds of places, shapes and forms, too: on business cards, blown up in the windows of office blocks, projected onto the Castle Rock come nightfall, even tied to trees and bushes in St. Andrew's Square.

There was also plenty of opportunity for audience participation: a few such shrubs had blank cards for your own poetic input - one already filled out in schoolboy handwriting with the chorus to Edwin Starr's 'War', with all the 'HUH's provided for good measure. For a genre that too often suffers from the need to be high-brow, it was great to see an initiative wanting to be edifying, inclusive and fun all at the same time.

And if you found a line you liked, you could take it along to the Poetry Library and the staff would point you in the direction of the whole poem or collection it was taken from. Brilliant. More brilliant was their stack of free poetry-based postcards, including a photo of that most illustrious piece of graffiti, "Hip Hop / Chip Shop". Now that's what I call poetry.

The Office, minus the terrible dancing

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 17:17:13 +0100

Mention the words 'the office' to 90% of the British public, and you'll more than likely conjure up images of a certain David Brent doing his awful, can't-look-away bit on the TV show of the same name. But in Inpress terms the words have a new, far less toe-curling meaning to them. Yes, we've moved, but not too far… only one floor down really.

Same beautiful listed building, now with more than double the space! We definitely needed it too, as the company continues to expand, both in terms of new publishers like Seren, Salmon Poetry, Dedalus and Red Squirrel joining our ranks, and in terms of our ideas and outlook in what will likely be a sea-change year in all our reading habits.

Yes, the iTab is upon us, and it will surely drag many of the other e-readers out there kicking and screaming towards our wants and needs as digital consumers. Video didn't kill the radio star, true, nor will e-books signal the end of all things print, but 2010 will certainly see us doing a lot more of our reading electronically (as you're doing right now, you may have noticed). And Inpress will be joining the revolution, no doubt about that. But more on that story later…

And while you're here, you may have noticed our new Travel, Music and Sport sections – be sure to take a look if you're in the mood to pastime.

Camilla De Clermont on CK Williams in The Rialto 68

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 15:15:27 +0100

The latest edition of The Rialto opens on a very ecological theme and, in doing so, illustrates the point that poetry is a sphere that should not remain isolated from such current, vital issues. As Michael Mackmin writes in his editorial, “this Earth was once a paradise and…personally I don’t need a climate scientist to tell me we’re wrecking the joint”.

Page one of the issue is occupied by ‘Bermudas’ by Andrew Marvell, a poem that paints a vision of earthly paradise where nature abounds with fertility – much like the cover illustration, teeming as it is with oceanic abundance in a circular, mandala-like motif. Both act as epigrams for the magazine’s first poem proper: the powerful ‘Vertigo’ by CK Williams. The seeming simplicity of the verses in ‘Vertigo’ acts like a smokescreen for the gravity of Williams’ message that “you are not not to think” about the extent of environmental damage inflicted upon our planet. Such simplicity effectively heightens the poem’s impact and as the stanzas progress, the potent argument moves from the abstract to the specific in the illustration of an overt link and responsibility between “you” and the world. It is all to CK Williams’ skill as a poet that ‘Vertigo’ sidesteps a didactic or preachy tone and acts instead as a brilliantly direct petition for heightened awareness and future change.

In all, this poem is a beautifully effective and heart-felt “call to take responsibility”, as Michael Mackmin puts it, and who knows, with literature increasingly leaping off the page and into the digital world, perhaps poetry will be getting greener in more ways than one as we move in 2010.

For John Rety: by Andy Croft

Mon, 15 Feb 2010 09:09:37 +0100

It is hard to say which was the more shocking – the news that John Rety had died last week, or the fact that he would have been eighty this year.

All editors publish in their own image, and John's editorial projects precisely reflected his passionate and provocative nature. He was a youthfully eclectic and eccentric promoter of poetry on the page and on the stage, a one-man cultural intervention who tried to take politics into poetry and poetry into politics, a genuine organic intellectual who was able to bring together so many literary and political worlds.

A former editor of the Anarchist newspaper Freedom, he ran Hearing Eye Press for more than twenty years (where he published people like Danny Abse, Pat Arrowsmith, Brian Doherty and Elsa Triolet). He organised regular, weekly poetry readings at the Torriano Meeting House in North London. The Torriano Meeting House poetry pamphlets series he edited included Jane Duran, E.A. Markham, John Hegley, Jeremy Reed, Labi Siffre, Dinah Livingstone. In 2003 he edited a big anthology, In the Company of Poets: An Anthology Celebrating 21 Years of Readings at Torriano Meeting House.

His popular 'Well-Versed' column in the Morning Star, the longest-running weekly poetry column in any national newspaper, was said to add an extra 2% to the paper's sales every Thursday. The best-selling anthology he edited of the same name (2009), brought together 120 poems by 86 writers, including Victor Hugo, Heinrich Heine, Jean Cassou, Paul Celan, Roque Dalton, Nazm Hikmet, Antonio Machado and Jacques Prévert. Well-known British names included Alan Brownjohn, Maureen Duffy, Erich Fried, John Heath-Stubbs, Arthur Jacobs, Bernard Kops and Adrian Mitchell. The book has just sold out and is about to go into a second edition.

John's own books included Song of Anarchy and Other Poems (1989), Banal Incidents from My First Period (1993), What's in a Word (1996), A Stranger Here (1998) and In the Museum (2007): "There were some whose occupation / was the occupation of territories / and there were those / whose occupation was work… The more abundance was produced / the more the occupiers took / the more the people worked / the more they got exploited… All because of a word with two meanings."

As the contemporary poetry scene chokes on self-promotion, literary celebrity and the travelling festival circus, John Rety should be remembered as a great and energetic force for good in radical poetry and politics. As he once wrote, "The most we can hope for, is that we might be understood by others / With different understandings to ourselves."

Andy Croft

Peter Mortimer returns to Camp Shatila

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:15:38 +0100

Peter Mortimer’s recent book Camp Shatila (Five Leaves Publications) details his time living on a Palestinian refugee camp. But that was just the start of the story.

Part of my time in the squalor that is Shatila in West Beirut was spent setting up a children’s theatre company. On my last day in Shatila, the children performed the play, Croak, the King & a Change in the Weather, which I wrote on camp, based on one of my fables. Despite only a rudimentary grasp of the language, the 11-12 year olds staged it in English – and no prompter.

I was so knocked out by the children, I vowed to bring them to perform in the UK, raised £22,000, and in September 2009, they came, performed eight times (including at the prestigious The Sage Gateshead), and blew everyone away. Everyone wanted more, so I’ve just returned to Beirut, and arranged a full week’s production in February 2011 at the modern Theatre Monot in East Beirut, the mainly Christian area where they as unlikely to see Palestinian refugees performing on stage as we are here.

An English writer arranging for a Palestinian group to perform a play in Lebanon felt quite bizarre, but it’s done. It’s now simply a matter of raising more loot to bring the new production back here straight after. The Sage wants to book the play for a further three days, as do The Saville Exchange in North Shields. It will be a new cast, a new production, and I’m hoping to bring a choreographer on board. The long-term dream is to have a series of North-East writers going into Shatila camp to create theatre with the kids. I say a dream, but then every stage of this project has started as a dream, and somehow come true.

Shatila is a poverty stricken place, in existence since 1948 and mainly forgotten by the world at large, except for years such as 1982, when up to 3,000 people were slaughtered in the Shatila massacre – just one more date and statistic in the interminable Middle-East conflict.

Can theatre make a difference? Of course it can! To quote the great Palestinian academic Edward Said, “not the culture of power, but the power of culture.”

Camilla de Clermont’s Review of White Ravens by Owen Sheers

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:10:46 +0100

On my first day at Inpress, I was informed pretty early on that it was a great day. No, not because I was there (!), but because of the imminent launch of four exciting new publishers. One of these was Seren, a leading Welsh independent publisher with a diverse range of over 400 books – a fact I was pleased to learn as I activated them on the Inpress website later that day.

As a Welsh culture neophyte (bar one slightly disastrous and snowy trip to Snowdonia about ten years ago), I had little idea what to expect when I agreed to read and review a Seren book. White Ravens by Owen Sheers is a modern adaptation of the Mabinogion story of Branwen, daughter of Llyr, and is part of a series that endeavours to bring the medieval stories to a modern audience. Well it certainly achieved that aim with me: once I’d started, I found White Ravens impossible to put down, captivated not only by Sheers’ power of description but also by the thoroughly absorbing plot. The beautiful way in which Sheers paints the farms and mountains of Wales speaks of a genuine love for and affinity with the country, as his afterword confirms.

White Ravens is masterfully woven from several stands of mythic and modern narrative: the tale of Rhian and her brothers forms a frame around the Old Man’s tale; and both of these segments reflect and rework the various elements of Branwen, daughter of Llyr. The inclusion of a synopsis of the original story allows the reader to trace how it has been seamlessly adapted and rejuvenated into an engrossing story that I cannot recommend highly enough.

“I can’t believe you’re reading a story from the Mabinogion!” exclaims my friend in her beautiful Welsh lilt, before proceeding to tell me how she learnt to translate parts of it from old to modern Welsh at school. Clearly, these timeless stories are still very much alive in Wales and how wonderful that, thanks to Seren and Inpress, they are reaching readers on the English side of the border too!

John Rety Obituary

Mon, 8 Feb 2010 09:09:36 +0100

John Rety was an energetic and deeply engaged publisher; a force for good in the world of poetry publishing. It is with regret and a heavy heart that we learnt of his recent death.

Born in Hungary in 1930 and a former editor of the anarchist newspaper Freedom, he later became a well-loved figure in the world of poetry and helped to nurture and support hundreds of poets. He began to work with Hearing Eye in the 1980s and has more recently been poetry editor at The Morning Star. He combined these two roles last year with the publication of the anthology Well Versed: Poetry from the Morning Star, which he also edited.

Morning Star assistant editor Richard Bagley paid tribute to John on the newspaper’s website. "John Rety was a captivating, razor-sharp and caring friend whose sense of fun and energy belied his years. He was without malice or prejudice," he said. "It has been a great honour to have known John and it is a deep shock to hear of his death. His family's loss is our loss."

Five Leaves editor Ross Bradshaw praised John’s work at the Torriano Meeting House, where he organised poetry events. “He had an ability to pull in important readers to this scruffy little venue, none of whom were paid, and who were happy to rub shoulders with "readers from the floor" with all that meant.” Ross continues, highlighting his skills as a publisher. “His press published Dannie Abse and others, actually about 200 publications in total, keeping them all in print.”

Julia Casterton summed up John perfectly in a review of Hearing Eye titles for Ambit magazine in 2002. “John Rety has an eye for all things counter, original, spare, strange... thank the Lord Hearing Eye exists.”

www.hearingeye.org

Camilla de Clermont's Review of The Skiers by Jill Bialosky

Thu, 4 Feb 2010 10:10:37 +0100

Anyone who has studied literature at any length knows the real and soothing pleasure of sinking into a book that has not been prescribed to them by a lecturer. The sensation is akin to slipping into a warm bath on a cold day and it was with just such a sensation that I opened Jill Bialosky’s The Skiers for the first time.

This is her first publication in the UK and brings together a selection of material from her three collections of poetry in one volume. The period over which they were published (not to mention written) spans over a decade, and through this time Jill Bialosky’s poems take us on a personal journey that speaks of very intimate experiences of love, desire and loss.

From detailed parental vignettes, through adolescent sexual awakening to the suicide of a sister, to the experience of motherhood, these poems draw the reader into a depth of genuine and, at times, raw emotion that strikes a chord on a far more accessible and relatable level than may be initially suggested. In The Skiers, inner emotion and external landscapes are seamlessly and beautifully interwoven, as are allusions to Classical and contemporary worlds, to create a collection that refuses to be confined to any one poetic form.

Bialosky’s balance of personal expression with scenic evocation produces poetry that is not only moving but also extremely enjoyable to read. At the end of this selection of wonderful poems I was left with only one question: when will Jill Bialosky’s full collections be published in the UK?

You can read more about Jill Bialosky here.

More Than Just Making Tea...

Tue, 2 Feb 2010 12:12:14 +0100

So with a final sneezing of snow and a spluttering North East wind, the most depressing month of the year is over for another 12 months - the beginning of the end for dark nights and cold mornings. It also marks the end of my (thankfully less depressing) stint as an Inpress Intern. It’s hard to believe that a month has passed already, and although my time here has been brief I leave with some fantastic experience and a heavily expanded list of ‘books to read in 2010’.

While some internships tend to require nothing more than the ability to stir milk into tea, the Inpress Internship has allowed me to have a genuine insight into the workings of the independent publishing sector. Over the past few weeks I’ve been able to see how Inpress carries out the vital function of promoting and marketing the books of its member publishers.

My own task of finding ways to help promote Sean Street’s brilliant new book, Time Between Tides, has allowed me to explore the multiple avenues through which independent books can become exposed to as many readers as possible. In an age of bestsellers lists dominated by blockbuster authors and celebrity autobiographies, it’s been great to see the passion for independent work that still exists and how effective Inpress is at giving those books a chance to compete against the big players.

And so I’d like to end by giving a big thanks to Inpress M.D. Rachael, who has done a brilliant job of growing Inpress into an increasingly significant player in the publishing industry over the past year, and who has ensured my internship has been an interesting and valuable experience. Both Rachael and her colleague James have been great to work with, and I wish both them and Inpress all the best for the future.

The Wide Expanse: Reading South Africa

Mon, 1 Feb 2010 09:09:56 +0100

In four weeks time, I’ll be taking part in a publishing tour to South Africa as a finalist with the British Council’s UK Young Publishing Entrepreneur award. Before I go, I want to answer a few questions: how do we value South African literature in this country? How and where do British readers interact with South African writing? To what extent does the industry nurture South African authors? Does our marketing do justice to their work? This blog will record my conversations and research before I leave the UK, and report on the book trade while I’m in South Africa.

Of all contemporary African literature, it is probably Nigeria’s which has loomed largest in the UK and US literary pages over recent few years, thanks largely to novelists Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Helen Oyeymi, who have introduced a younger generation of readers to an established literary tradition which includes luminaries Chinua Achebe, Ben Okri and Wole Soyinka. Two South Bank Shows were devoted to Nigerian literature in May 2009 (and specifically to Adichie and Achebe). Has the rise of Nigerian writing left South African authors behind?

Not so, says Daneet Steffens, well-travelled bibliophile and editor of Mslexia, the magazine for women who write. Daneet believes that the UK offers a relatively solid representation of writing from throughout the Commonwealth via publishers, bookstores and prizes. “What's particularly exciting and vibrant about South African women writers at the moment,” she says, “is that there is a strong multi-generational and multi-ethnic presence, covering an intense and highly-charged time.”

Some of the writers who are particularly exciting to Daneet are Nadine Gordimer, Sindiwe Magona, Gillian Slovo, Pamela Jooste, Zoe Wicomb, Rozena Maart, Gabeba Baderoon and Rachel Zadok. “At a critical moment of the South African story, you've got a chorus of vibrant voices, contributing to a rich, all-encompassing narrative that's still developing.”

I wonder how many of these writers are accessible to the British reading public. In my next blog, I'll be reporting from the high street on the representation of South African authors in our bookstores.

Visit The Wide Expanse

"James, What is Sunderland?"

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:14:01 +0100

Of all the choice phrases I heard whilst at uni down south, my all-time favourite has to be the question "James, what is Sunderland?" That's right, not 'where?' – 'what?'

Although Inpress is a national, and indeed international organisation, it's good to know that my home the North East is more than well represented. In fact, the very first book I read and reviewed from the Inpress range – Scars Beneath the Skin by AJ Duggan (whose own blogs and micro-stories you'll also find on these pages) – was published by Newcastle-based Flambard Press, and it still stands out as my five-star recommendation on top of the review pile.

Only an hour or so down the road, in Middlesbrough – birthplace of Cloughie, hellhole for Clarkson – we have Smokestack Books, a publisher that prides itself on representing all that is "unconventional, unfashionable, radical or left-field" in poetry, on cutting against the grain of your more archetypal cultural centres and their output. Check out the brilliant jazz-rhythms of American poet F.D. Reeve's The Blue Cat Walks the Earth and you'll see what I mean.

And finally, somewhere between these two, in the quaint old fishing village of Cullercoats, there's the mighty Iron Press, the UK's leading independent publisher of haiku, and so much more besides. They're the people behind the fantastic Our Sweet Little Time, a perfect month-by-month plotting of a year in the life of poet Hamish Ironside.

2009 in books may have been dominated by long-haul tomes like Wolf Hall and The Lost Symbol, but perhaps 2010 – with all the technological advances it will no doubt bring – will be the year of the quick-read, the poem/story-a-day on the way to work, from your pocket or from your e-reader. And if that's the case, be it in micro-fiction, poetry or the humble haiku, the North East seems well set.

Yvette Hawkins reads Blue Bay Palace by Natacha Appanah

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:14:49 +0100

How apt that during the coldest winter Britain has seen since the eighties, I should be reading a book which transports me into a climate of hot temperaments, salty sea breezes and wild passionate relationships. The contrast of my bed socks and steaming mug of hot chocolate against the setting of a beautiful Mauritius resort and the volatile relations within it, nicely set me off to leave my freezing cold (even with the heating on full) living room behind and delve into the world of Maya - a young girl from a poor family, whose dreams of escape are inspired by Dave, an intriguing but weak willed man, who just happens to own the very resort she and her father work in.

As the story unfolds we witness much of Maya's great passions, many of which reflect the conflicted landscape, the clean white sands of the beach resort she works in and the old ramshackled family home made of drift wood and corrugated metal where she and her family reside. When Dave follows his family's wishes to marry someone from his own caste, Maya, tortured by intensely vivid dreams of a murderous rage, embarks on a journey of a wicked inconsolable anger.

Nathacha Appanah paints a wonderfully contrasted world, full bodied and rich in the illusion of the diverse caste systems within Mauritius and the messy love affair between two people on opposite sides of the line. The book itself could carry more weight, but Appanah's child-like language fits Maya's adolescent encounter with love and sex perfectly.

Steven Boodhun's Second Intern Blog: The Return of the Book Club

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 10:10:29 +0100

Historically book clubs have been viewed, somewhat unfairly, as the home of socially inept misfits and geeks. A few years ago Channel 4 aired a brilliant series called ‘The Book Group’, whose cast of characters included a drug addled, egotistical postgraduate student and a straggler who hides his bisexuality with a passion for football. These were obvious exaggerations, but they also highlighted the public’s perception of book clubs as somewhat nerdy or strange.

My own experience as a member of a book club at university was a bit of a mixed bag- at times a genuine opportunity to share ideas and discover new authors, at others simply a chance for students to be at their most pretentious- using words like ‘poststructuralist’ and ‘hypermodernity’ with little care for the actual story itself.

A lot changed in 2004 however, when Richard and Judy decided to run a weekly book club slot during their show. Sprinkling some much needed glamour onto the book club’s dowdy image, It featured a mix of celebrities and critics talking about books in a way that that was both engaging and- most importantly- accessible. Suddenly, book clubs had been given a TV makeover. They were sexy.

It was with interest therefore that I read of channel 4’s decision to bring back the book club in its own half hour weekly slot- minus R & J this time (last seen wandering around the shadowy netherworld of cable TV), but still featuring the obligatory ‘Celebrity Guest’. This is great news for the book industry- especially for those authors now destined to fly into the top ten on being reviewed. The chronic lack of programmes currently featuring reviews of new literature on TV is surprising, especially considering that the public’s appetite for reading is as strong as ever. If done well, this new show could mark the start of a great relationship between TV and books. If done badly, it could simply be Gok Wan talking about Jordan’s latest biography. Either way, I’ll be watching.

New Year, New Intern

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:11:56 +0100

‘Coldest Winter for 30 Years!’ screamed the headline of the free newspaper lying muddied and dejected on the floor of the mercifully warm Tyne and Wear metro. Having spent the previous ten minutes huddled in a state of rigid, teeth chattering numbness on the outdoor platform waiting for a train to arrive, it was already old news to me.

The idea of being battered by an arctic wind on a bracing Monday morning in January wouldn’t usually fill a person with glowing enthusiasm, but as I exited Central Station and began to clumsily slip and slush my way towards the ever dignified Collingwood Building for my first day as an Inpress intern, I couldn’t help feeling both intrigued and optimistic. Having attended the first Inpress conference in December and had the pleasure of meeting some of the publishers and board members, it had been clear that Inpress was a growing business with both a respect for quality literature, and a passion for getting it into the hands of the book buying public. It was also a chance to meet my fellow intern James and the Managing Director Rachael, both of whom made me feel instantly welcome.

It was this same welcome I received as I shuddered cold and frozen into the office, and as I was shown how to upload new books onto the Inpress website I was again reminded of how the company is constantly growing and developing - with new books and even new publishers constantly being added to an already substantial list. Exciting times! Shame about the weather.

New Year's Revolutions

Wed, 6 Jan 2010 11:11:26 +0100

And that's that; goodbye Noughties. A decade that saw the birth of social networking, the rebirth of the TV talent show, and the complete reversal in fortune for a once-ridiculed brand called Apple.

In books, the past ten years belonged to three big names: JK Rowling, who now reportedly has more money than the Queen; Dan Brown, who presumably thinks that our dormant monarchy are plotting world domination; and some ghost-writer who writes under the name 'Katie Price', whoever that is.

Of course, bestsellers are about as representative of literary output as those women they push to the front of the audience on Top Gear are of your average car bore.

Let's not forget that this was also the decade of 'geek chic': the graphic novel went mainstream, and book-buyers, film-goers and TV-watchers alike gorged themselves on anything and everything vampiric (Twilight / True Blood).

The 00s were also an era of nostalgia: too many franchises to mention were rebooted or relaunched, and books like David Peace's controversial The Damned United brought a whole new meaning to the term 'historical fiction'. Maybe the 60s and 70s are so appealing because they just sound better.

And speaking of creating history, over the break I got the chance to dust off my old copy of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, largely spurred on by Route's new collection of essays and responses - Howl for Now - to the Ulysses of beat poetry. (I still think that "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night" is one of the greatest poetic lines ever written, even if I did first discover it through the 1995 teen-flick Hackers.)

2010 will no doubt be the year that the e-reader revolution really gets rolling. The jury may be out at the moment, but Apple's iTablet may be with us as early as March or April, and may just do for books what the iPod did for music. Starry dynamo indeed.

James Hogg's Review of Route's Born in the 1980s: Stories from our so-called generation

Wed, 9 Dec 2009 11:11:57 +0100

"Nike or Reebok – you were cool; Gola or Hi-Tec – you were sad and no one cool would like you"

As someone born in Orwell's year of '84, I’ve always been a bit uneasy about being part of 'a generation'. Growing up in the nineties and noughties, that whole idea of one identity per decade is so much more slippery now compared to those halcyon / bad-hair days of the 60s, 70s and 80s. And whereas that generation produced some of the most enduring popular icons ever, my generation is best represented by those novelty T-shirts with the Thundercats or the Transformers on the front… My Generation? They had The Who, and we got Limp Bizkit; say no more.

It's this same paradoxical feeling of detachment in a never-better-connected world that cuts through Route's latest short-story collection. These are tales of the re- and de-location that so often follows hitting your twenties, in an age where everything is derivative, and it's harder and harder to carve out a place in the world:

"I tell him to be quiet because it feels like everything is scripted"

Many of the stories deal with relationships in their many forms: with love/hate, with car-crash romances and family break-ups, with the helpless, sometimes hopeless cycles of the dating game. We see the full gamut of emotions from that hinterland between child- and adulthood: from the rose-tinted nostalgia for a simpler life left behind, to the spectre of mortality that haunts even so young an age.

Most rewardingly, though, there are plenty of flashes of the self-deprecating, ironic humour that a generation weaned on the Spice Girls and social networking does so well.

Of the 10 stories, my personal favourites would be Sally Jenkinson's 'Brown Rice' – a jaunty yet melancholic Polaroid of single, too-much-too-young parenthood – and Sam Duda's 'The Things I Learned About Leah Today', a diary on office flirtation that slowly, almost imperceptibly skews into something far less sweet and innocent.

A provocative, comforting, challenging anthology. And if you're looking for a Christmas gift for that hard-to-buy-for twenty-something in your life, then look no further.

Crossing borders

Thu, 3 Dec 2009 16:16:59 +0100

Following on from last week's blog – on Waterstones and the need for bookstores on our high streets – this week's news has been dominated by the sad demise of Borders. With 45 stores in the UK, £20 million of stock in limbo, and a whole load of jobs on the line, it's a bitter pill to swallow for many people, as well as for book-lovers in general.

Borders was a great bookshop, in terms of both the range on offer and the specialist knowledge on hand—something that's hard to find when it comes to face-to-face buying these days. But for me Borders's USP was its opening times: my local Borders as a student was open until 10 o'clock at night, and always seemed popular/profitable with the after-work crowd.

More broadly, the apparent gimmick of late-opening is actually a major player in the debate on why us Brits haven't yet embraced so-called café culture, leisurely wandering our city streets by night. The fact is, unlike our North American brethren (Borders is, after all, an American company), who have the luxury of being able to shop late into the night when they're downtown, there's very little to do in UK city centres after 6pm but drink. Or go to the 24-hour Tesco and buy cheap drink.

So the disappearance of Borders has a cultural bearing too, just as much as a cinema, theatre or museum closing down would. And although the Guardian's Stuart Jeffries would have us think that Waterstones has ruined the art of bookselling, maybe those of us not blessed with London's shops should be grateful that there are still books to be had in our cities at all.

James Hogg's Review of Three Men on a Metro by Andy Croft, W.N. Herbert and Paul Summers: "the vodka's nudged our volume switch"

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:11:07 +0100

"We're ticking clockwise round the stain / Of Stalin's coffee cup again"

If you're a fan of BBC's The Culture Show, you may have caught the report a few weeks back on the astonishing art and architecture of the Moscow Metro. And if you were left wanting more of this bold, beautiful and rather unsettling testament to the Stalinist ideal, then you really should read Three Men on the Metro.

Spurred on by the apparent cult success in Soviet Russia of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men on a Boat, North-East poets Andy Croft, Bill Herbert and Paul Summers are the "lost-beneath-attention men" of the title, tasked with bringing back tales of wonderment from the Moscow underground.

The result is part guide-book, part Alice in Wonderland – full to the brim of experiments in rhyme, sonnet and blank verse, and even the odd micro-work of drama and fiction.

It's studied yet frenetic, with the occasional bolt of Jerome silliness thrown in: there are odes to a shoe half-swallowed by an escalator, to Yeltsin's purge of Moscow's squirrel population, and even to Laika the cosmo-dog. And whereas you might expect to find references to Dostoevsky, Mayakovsky and Pushkin in all this – or even Burns, Coleridge and H.G. Wells – you'll also see modern Russia's fondness for Kylie, Lord of the Rings and SpongeBob Squarepants.

But there's also a stygian darkness to the Metromen's lightning sketches. Not only do they remember the bloodshed of Red October and all that followed, but we're also transported deep into new Russia's Two Nations, in the age of the oligarchs and the Golden Youth: where "the Mobster and the Businessmen" rule; where the underground remains a place of acrid rage and danger, of "vodka's reptile cellars"; where the problems of homelessness, degradation and white supremacy are still rife.

Three Men on the Metro isn't tourist gift-shop fodder, regulated by the powers that be. Like Sergei Lukyanenko's Night Watch series, these poems aren't afraid to engage with the here-and-now intrigues of Putin and Medvedev's Russia, while still retaining "that yielding of Eurydice" in a city whose fiery, caustic history it's impossible not to look back on.

James Hogg's Review of Natural Selection by Cecilia Szperling: "Things were falling around her and she couldn't stop them"

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 10:10:19 +0100

"Cosme had told her he wanted to live as if in a dream. With no morals and a logic of its own."

Next Tuesday (24th November) may mark the 150th anniversary of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, but this novel from Argentina provides an altogether livelier, feistier, bleaker take on our concept of evolution.

Set in Buenos Aires, this is a tale of interweaving narratives, of lost souls who are perhaps not the fittest to survive. At its centre is Ernestina, a kind of Elizabeth Bennett for the chemical generation. Her relationships with her vulturous leading men Cosme and Pablo, her extreme rivalry with her beauty-queen sister Emma, and her frequent descent into the mires of manic, panicked neurosis are all laid out with unerring, unsettling sobriety.

Drugs play their role – there are flashes of Hubert Selby Jr.'s Requiem for a Dream throughout, as the lines between recreation and dependence are quickly and dangerously blurred. But this is not just Trainspotting South American-style. There is an earthier, more primeval sense of threat here: the Argentinean capital becomes a City unhinged, with something hauntingly Gothic lurking beneath the modern-day metropolis.

And, for all its force and power to disturb, the novel also has serious things to say about Art and the role of the artist, about the fragility of youth/beauty, and about the melancholy of loss and displacement.

Natural Selection may suffer from the odd faulty simile, and the acid-trip hysteria may all get a bit Rainbow Rhythms at times, but at its core it remains a fascinating trek along society's fault-lines, looking cold and hard at the crises at the eye of our evolutionary storm.

Throwing WaterStones in Glass Houses

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 14:14:43 +0100

The Guardian's Stuart Jeffries has had his knives out today, in a not-too-subtle article on "How Waterstone’s killed bookselling". In it he accuses Waterstone's of selling out—pandering to the lowest common denominator with its stacks of celeb trash biogs, and single-handedly squashing all hopes of a future for literary fiction.

Harsh? Probably. True, it is hugely disheartening to walk into a store filled with cardboard cutouts of cardboard celebs… but who's to blame in all this? The booksellers/publishers for peddling them, or us losers for demanding them in such huge quantity? It goes both ways. If you got suckered into that seventeenth credit card and then got into debt, is it the credit card company's fault for putting a note through your door?

It's also worth being thankful that booksellers still have a high-street presence at all. You can get all teary-eyed and nostalgic for the days when Waterstone's were 'one of the good guys', but Woolworth's anyone? Jeffries bewails the fact that "Waterstone's has embraced capitalism's logic firmly," but it's a business, right? With city-centre overheads that the mighty supermarkets and internet giants like Amazon avoid; it's safe to say the competition's clearly got the jump on them from the off…

Yes, bookstores have a certain duty as a cultural centre, but with Borders recently pulling out of Oxford Street, maybe we should be glad of the continuing presence of books on the High Street and in the city centre, and that goes for the big boys and independents alike.

James Hogg's Review of Alan Bilton's The Sleepwalkers' Ball: "Raindrops sparkled in her hair and her eyes were dark and saucy"

Mon, 9 Nov 2009 10:10:44 +0100

"Even when the work perishes, its ghost is left behind, like an outline of the possible"

As a kid, ambling around my family's hometown of Stirling, I remember all the tales of the Green Lady, the spectral presence of an old governor's daughter who dashed herself on the castle rocks after her lover's death. And, like so many, I lapped it up. Even today, there remains something deliciously Gothic about the ghost-walks of Scotland's cities—a spirit so wonderfully distilled in Alan Bilton's novel.

The Sleepwalkers' Ball is by no means a mere ghost story, however. Yes, the story of Hans – layabout, daydreamer, freeloader – and his eternal quest for the beloved yet elusive Clara is all dark alleys and tenement stoops, outrageous features and bizarre happenings (we even have our own maniacal tour-guide as we wander along); but it's also a modern rom-com, a satire of the urban grind, and an exquisite study of voice and perspective, all rolled into one. I could see Guillermo del Toro or Terry Gilliam turning their hands to filming it, only with flashes of Allen Ginsberg, Neil Gaiman, and even Monty Python thrown in for good measure.

The Sleepwalkers' Ball is a nightwatch like no other, filled with stormy, punchy writing, and featuring some of the best descriptions of weather, old age and drunkenness I've read in a long, long time. It's also a refreshing, intriguing spin on the age-old 'tired soul meets free spirit' formula. Above all, though, it's a rampant celebration of the simultaneity of the mind and the power of dreams, walking the tightrope between fantasy and reality with the greatest of ease.

James Hogg's Review of Our Sweet Little Time: A Year in Haiku by Hamish Ironside

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 11:11:45 +0100

Looking at the cover of Our Sweet Little Time, you'd be forgiven for expecting a jolly, evergreen jaunt through a year in the life of poet Hamish Ironside. But once inside, you realise that – like the poems themselves – the title is its own finely honed riddle, one that allows interpretations ranging from the joy and bounce in 'sweet' and 'little' to the fleetingness of what 'little time' we all have together.

And while there are certain themes you would expect of haiku – the cycles of nature, especially – there are also many you wouldn't: from DIY and learning to type, to drunken self-doubt and the evils of househunting. As we're taken through the months of the year, there's just as much that's raw and shocking as there is ethereal and Romantic:

my daughter's screaming / settled by footage / of war in Iraq

In each three-line gem we sway quickly between the blackly comic, the vaguely despairing, and the warmly reaffirming, from the bludgeoning of insects in May to the birth of a baby daughter in July: making toy scissors / of the surgeon's knife / I cut her loose to life.

To convey this range of emotions in a single, stripped-bare medium, and to show such precision of control without hint of pretence, is no mean achievement. The writing is also neatly offset by the wacky illustrations of Barnaby Richards, which offer up not just decoration, but visual puzzles of their own. And together they bring life to the art of haiku as an enduring form of brain-training for poet and reader alike, and a wonderful one at that.

On Editing the IRON Book of New Humorous Verse

Wed, 4 Nov 2009 15:15:28 +0100

You just have to look at the surface of my study carpet to see that tidiness isn't my thing, but I'm organising the growing heaps of submissions meticulously into boxes. The (provisional) shortlist level is rising encouragingly, but adding to the reject pile in the bigger box is no fun – I get enough of my own stuff turned down to know it's always demoralising. And many of the entries that don't make my initial selection are good – they just don't work well as humorous poems. Some fall down at the last hurdle. Getting the right ending for a poem is always hard and it's probably ten times harder when you're writing comic poetry. It can be tempting to ask the last line to carry all or most of the poem's humour, perhaps with a sudden change of tone – e.g. where a mild and lengthy piece about home baking veers into a bit of concluding profanity to signal that it's pushing more than scone dough boundaries.

Of course the unexpected is a very big part of humour but I think you have to judge and time the surprises right – maybe even getting straight into the biggest one. Benjamin Zephaniah does this in the first line of 'Talking Turkeys!!' (pub. Viking): 'Be nice to yuh turkeys dis christmas'. This famous poem's last line delivers a final extra shot of humour and meaning, but it's not a punchline – the poem doesn't need one; it makes its points and it's funny all the way through.

Sticking with the bird theme, the policeman hero of Kit Wright's Sergeant Brown's Parrot (pub. Harper Collins), has 'a tall green parrot' on his shoulder instead of one of the 'cunning little radios' that are standard police issue. The parrot asks, 'Who's-a-pretty-boy-then?' – and the poem ends with: '"I am", says Sergeant Brown'. The clever reversal in the final line is a great end to a brilliant satire on the misuse of authority and its trappings – but even in this shortish poem the humour and surprises build throughout, especially in the detail. (Both poems are included in The Nation's Favourite Comic Poems, edited by Griff Rhys Jones and published by BBC Books.)

The closing date for submissions (see guidelines: IRON Press Anthology) is still 31st March next year, so the final choices won't be made until after that. The scone poem is a made up example – I won't, of course, be quoting from any real submissions to make points in this blog. And I've got nothing against well placed and non-gratuitous profanities. Or edgy home baking.

Eileen Jones
2nd November 2009

James Hogg's Review of Minus by Roman Senchin: "They’re happy while, for you, it’s the end of everything"

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:10:58 +0100

"Money changes us instantly. We become tense and uncommunicative. We now have something to lose, and we are very keen not to lose it."

Think of Russia today and you’ll more than likely think of Roman Abramovich, or the cash-rich, slightly villainous characters that abuse the staff on holiday.

But before all that, I remember Michael Palin's visit to post-Soviet Russia as part of his Pole to Pole series, in which he blunders through a bizarre ritual of coupons and storefront counters just to get hold of a bottle of vodka. This was the Russia that the oligarchs left behind, and it's this same sense of a caged, future-less nation that informs Roman Senchin's Minus.

The novel follows a lapsed anarchist and theatre stagehand, also called Roman, who nightly shifts every kind of scene but his own. He's part of a generation of nomadic nearly men in the Siberian town of Minusinsk, existing day-to-day on a staple diet of potatoes and moonshine, the deceptions of childhood a long and distant memory. The ideological fervour of the past has also been and gone, replaced by the stark, unsentimental nihilism at the heart of both Romans – narrator and author.

Senchin has been widely celebrated for his 'New Realism' – the novel is filled with detail, from the cigarettes and alcohol of choice to the way meat is stored in between window frames as the winter sets in. As a result of this near-photographic clarity, any device remotely resembling plot – the promise of a robbery, or a drugs arrest, even a murder – is quickly shot down, negated. And it all fits neatly with the book’s 'illusion vs. reality' theme – that other staple of Russian literature and history alike – be it on stage or in the street.

While you can't help feeling that certain expressions have been lost in translation, Minus remains fascinatingly bleak and laden with knowing irony, a Lonely Planet Russia in every sense.

Reporting live from somewhere

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:10:43 +0100

'Egocasting'. It might sound like one of those corporate buzzwords like 'imagineer' or 'soft-landing position', but it goes a long way into describing how we interact with the media these days.

Never before have we had so much power as individuals over what we read, watch and listen to. We can watch TV online and on-demand, or record anything and everything without scrambling around for a blank tape. MP3 playlists mean that we need never listen to a whole album all the way through ever again, and the news is presented to us in increasingly digestable and targeted ways: e-newsletters, virals, 60-second catch-ups.

But as a direct consequence to all this choice, our fields of interest are narrowing more and more. We're not being exposed to themes and opinions that clash with or contradict our own – this is where the 'ego' in egocasting comes in. It's the equivalent of only ever reading the same columnist in the same newspaper, and nothing more.

In a way, then, the egocasting phenomenon means it's even more important to keep expanding our horizons, to deny our instinct to take in only what we know we already like. The book review I'm working on at the moment is a Russian translation that I would never have even picked up in a high street store, let alone read. And I'm learning a lot about a far-flung corner of the world from someone who actually lives there, and with so many other commentators trying to tell us what it's like 'over there' (wherever 'there' may be), that can only be a good thing.

Kindle unveiling fails to spark the imagination

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:16:14 +0100

Cry havoc! The end of the book is nigh! Well, not exactly.

There's been a lot in the news this week about the arrival of Amazon's Kindle e-reader on UK shores, and whether or not this spells the end of print on paper. Not that the media is prone to hyperbole or anything…

Yes, the idea of shrinking several thousand heavy hardbacks or cumbersome broadsheets onto one device is a very attractive one, but can the Kindle seriously claim to be the new iPod?

For a start, what an awful name. Just saying the word Kindle, to me at least, conjures up images of Ray Mears preparing to light a fire, or a certain chocolate egg with a remarkably un-child-friendly toy inside.

E-readers don't have the might and brilliance of an Apple marketing campaign behind them (yet). And the iPod revolution first came about because of its must-have, trend-hungry target market: the young. Books and newspapers are, for the most part, an altogether different, more mature prospect – and their appeal is much more to do with touch and texture than the likes of music and video. The words 'techie' and 'bibliophile' don’t exactly belong together, like 'racy' and 'librarian', or 'loaded' and 'student'.

It's also worth remembering that – in a world where the words 'Downloading' and 'Buffering' can bring screams of despair from the best of us – books don't crash, run out of batteries, or come with a pitifully short warranty. The e-book revolution may be inevitable, but right now the Kindle looks destined to be no more than a niche product, popular at Christmas, in the loft by Easter.

James Hogg’s Review of Rule of Night by Trevor Hoyle

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:16:25 +0100

"Of course they were always on the lookout for trouble – at the back of their minds seeking it, ferreting it out…"

Standing at the gates of Hell, Dante famously finds the inscription "All hope abandon ye who enter here". In an altogether different hell-hole – the Ashfield Valley Estate of Rochdale in 1975 – the stairwell graffiti is even more to the point: "If you get caught in here God help you lousy scum". And so begins Trevor Hoyle's superb vision of the kind of gritty, grainy, politically charged violence forever associated with the 1970s.

Pomona's re-release of Rule of Night has come at just the right time, but not just because it time-capsules us back 35 years to an age of asbestos factories, Golden Wonder crisps and smoking on the bus, when you could get a round in for a handful of change. It's also a prescient nod to another Broken Britain, a knowing reminder that today's culture of hoodies, ASBOs and the demon youth is hardly a new concept.

The story of young Kenny Seddon's fall from disgrace reads like an updated, relocated Brighton Rock: a snapshot of violence in a young mind, and in all its forms – racial, sexual, familial, territorial – as well as the downright arbitrariness of it all.

In a world populated by the droog disciples of A Clockwork Orange, Hoyle avoids caricature and bombast as he draws out the push and pull of hooligan life – down the pub, at the match, in the gang and on your own.

As a result, character rightly overrides plot: it doesn't all boil down to one climactic pitched battle outside the Cup Final; it's not that kind of book. Instead it's spun out with an austere handycam cool, mixing the dirt and struggle with humour and heart.

The re-release includes Hoyle's own afterword from 2003, which gives an insight into the novel's genesis in "the era of the 'bovver' boy", and explains the author's curiosity over what lay beneath the shaven skulls – the human element of "working-class life at the bottom of the barrel". And to peel back those layers without reading like Dickens-on-the-estate is a remarkable achievement.

James Hogg’s Review of Dusk Music by Rob Chapman: “An art-life inverted”

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:15:38 +0100

[b]"She smiled a split-second smile, just long enough to say, I’m cool, I’m yours. Keith Gear was cool enough not to smile back."[/b]

I love my music. I'd love to someday be famous enough to go on Desert Island Discs and splurge my favourite tracks onto an unsuspecting world. But I'd definitely put myself in the 'safe' category of music-lovers – I've been to about half a dozen gigs in my life; I'm almost magnetically attached to the 'Recently Played' playlist on my iPod; and any urge to actually learn to play an instrument stopped with the recorder, age 5, because it clashed with football at break-times.

That said, the idea of a fictional, parallel world of music that takes the life of Jimi Hendrix as its lynchpin is a tough one to sniffle at. And the name Keith Gear, hero of Dusk Music, says it all really: he's part everyman, part rock-god – he's a megastar at 19 and it's never going to last.

The narrative twists and turns all over the shop, taking in the wide-eyed, grimy genius of acid-lit jam sessions with Jimi, through the trials of Thatcher's 80s, to the mid-90s prospect of a poorly-attended benefit gig in, you guessed it, Sunderland. And beyond.

Everything in Dusk Music is slightly off-pitch and out of focus, but there are definite pangs of pathos to be felt for the Withnail & I squalor and chaos of Gear's existence as he watches the spirit of ’68 get corporatised into oblivion.

Gear's fall from the heady shedding of prejudice in Soho and NY's East Village to cold, need-money-for-the-meter obscurity is hard to stomach, and often the deftness of the writing gets lost in the epic scope of it all. But what Dusk Music does best is being, at times, very dry and very funny, poking fun and having a pop at the various crimes of music media, and of opinion-makers in general.

Looking for a new fix

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:16:10 +0100

After months of delaying tactics and rewards for taking it 'one episode at a time', I’ve finally gone and finished my DVD boxsets of The Wire. So a tricky decision to make: which bandwagon to unashamedly jump on next?

What makes this all so tricky is that – after the brutally pared-down realism of The Wire – all the other pop-culture signposts out there seem desperate to either look back to our past or forward to our future, instead of looking at the here and now.

Looking back: this year's Man Booker Prize shortlist was heavily dominated by historical fiction (the winner, Wolf Hall, is set in the reign of Henry VIII), and Hollywood seemingly can't get enough of sending us back to our childhoods with each and every remake, sequel, prequel it shunts out onto the big screen. And which band hasn't reformed in recent times? Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Bananarama, Take That, Spandau Ballet, Madness… the list goes on.

Looking forward: look no further than FlashForward, banded about as the new Lost, or more broadly at the rise of geek culture as us normals seemingly can't get enough of all things sci-fi. Even Edinburgh grit-meister Ian Rankin's gone all comic-book with his first graphic novel, Dark Entries. And the closest current rival to The Wire as TV's greatest ever? Battlestar Galactica. A show reworked from the 70s, set in the distant future; it ticks both escapist boxes, and it's been wildly successful.

Of course, it's no surprise really that we're lapping up anything and everything that doesn't remind us of credit crunches, sneaky bankers and phantom mortgages – for the same reason that people flocked to the cinema during the Great Depression. And the boxset generation is lucky enough to bring that escape home with them, to get that personal, private enjoyment previously reserved only for books. But at least with a book I never have to worry about not having Blu-Ray…

The Little Ripon Bookshop

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:12:22 +0100

As most readers of this blog will know, Inpress exists to support, nurture and champion independent publishers. To take a couple of comparisons from another areas of industry, our publishers are the artisan chocolatiers in a world of mass-produced Mars bars; the micro-brewers in a world dominated by Fosters larger. And, just as chocolatiers like to see their delicious morsels in fine, independent chocolate shops, and real ale manufacturers prefer to sell to the quality free houses, we love to supply books to smart and knowledgeable independent bookshops.

So it follows that we are always overjoyed to discover a new independent bookseller. This weekend I happened upon The Little Ripon Bookshop, based in the centre of this compact, bustling North Yorkshire cathedral city. Simon and Gill Edwards opened their very attractive shop in July this year to the delight of Ripon’s numerous book clubs. The shop has its own blog and has recently begun to run in-store events. They also offer a fantastic ordering service, with over 300,000 titles available for same day collection, including many of those by Inpress publishers.

13 Westgate, Ripon, North Yorkshire, HG4 3AT. Tel: 01765 606689. www.littleriponbookshop.co.uk

Yvette Hawkins - Reader in Residence

Fri, 2 Oct 2009 12:12:38 +0100

The first thing that grabbed me about Their Mountain Mother by Edmund Prestwich was the sheer physicality of the book - an unusually square book, with big thick, meaty pages. In this age, where the world is turning to e-books and scanning daily digests of the world’s top stories on Google Reader over a cup of super strength coffee, it seems that the physical presence of the old-school version is all that’s keeping us from turning completely digital. I agree that the convenience of the new e-readers have some merit, but the loss of having the ritual of turning pages in the bath (trying not to get them wet), smelling the crisp pages of a freshly bought novel, or the discoveries found in second hand shops (I found a pressed flower in the front of The Hobbit and a shopping list at the back) could never be compensated with the handiness of carrying a memory stick of novels in my handbag.

Prestwich delivers an intensely compelling story of one mans journey to help his people cross a land rife of massacre, despair and solitude where cannibals born out of hunger and other human perils lie ahead. The focus lies upon Moshoeshoe and his peoples trust in his wit and bravery to lead them to a new land. What I enjoyed about this book was Prestwich’s beautiful ability to lead us into another world, rich in culture, history and language. For much of the book I forgot I was reading a poem, each line drifting into the next, engaging with the pace of the drama with no time to linger, yet each line is met with an elegance that can only be found in poetry. Aside from this structure we also find some superbly executed lino etchings by Emily Johns which evoke the drama and powerful narrative found in Prestwich’s epic poem. A gorgeous book, which no matter what you prefer, needs to be experienced first hand, in your hands, without batteries.

James Hogg's Third Intern Blog: Reading further afield

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 15:15:17 +0100

Leafing through yesterday's Sunday Times, I had a quick gander at the bestsellers lists. Under hardback fiction, the book in the number two spot (Ian Rankin's latest) sold roughly 6,000 copies this past week. No prizes, of course, for guessing that top of the charts went to Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol, weighing in at well over 550,000.

My response to this (after wishing I was Mr. Brown's agent/publisher/first-born) was mixed. On the one hand, (a) it wasn't written by Jordan, and (b) it's great to see so many people getting into all this 'clever' stuff: puzzle-solving their way through the myths and legends surrounding all these dry historical institutions. We Brits have never really been down with flashing our intelligence cards, but now it suddenly seems cool to be clever. Look at Stephen Fry, who, despite being around forever, has suddenly become everyone's hero. Look at the Nintendo DS, and all that brain-training malarkey. Be it books or video games, two Professors – Langdon and Layton – rule the roost, and that can only be a good thing.

On the other hand, however, it’s all a bit sad, really. Looking at that bestsellers list, I couldn't help thinking about a wickedly sharp passage in Jayne Joso's Soothing Music for Stray Cats, in which our estranged hero is shocked at how everyone on the Tube appears to be reading the same book (The Da Vinci Code, as it turns out), and wonders why people aren't a bit more adventurous in their reading. I guess it's a bit like the tourists who arrive in a foreign land and head straight for the nearest McDonald's…

But here at Inpress, sitting on my desk I've got a translated Russian novel about a group of disillusioned young men living among the oligarchs (Minus by Roman Senchin), and a madcap Gothic romantic comedy about a man in his pyjamas in search of "the art school girl with the lovely round face" (Alan Bilton’s The Sleepwalker’s Ball).

Intelligence and variety all in one place? That's more like it!