INPRESS BOOKS
OCTOBER - DECEMBER 2018
BOOKS FOR INDEPENDENT THINKERS
HELLO FROM INPRESS
ABOUT INPRESS Established in 2002, Inpress are an Arts Council funded sales & marketing agency who work with independent publishers to help their books reach a wider audience. Based in Newcastle upon Tyne we work with over 40 brilliant small presses and as such are a one stop shop for booksellers and book-lovers alike who are looking for something a little bit different. Our diverse and innovative publishers produce around 300 books a year on a range of subjects so whatever your niche, we have something for you. Our quarterly catalogue showcases work by all publishers, big and small and our in house sales team and local reps are always happy to talk our list in more depth, so please get in touch!
TRANSLATING FEMINISMS
A NEW SERIES OF POETRY CHAPBOOKS FROM TILTED AXIS PRESS Translating Feminisms showcases intimate collaborations and conversations between some of Asia’s most exciting women writers and emerging-star translators: contemporary poetry of labour and language, alongside essays exploring how, where and by whom feminist writing and female bodies are translated. They publish on November 5th 2018. FROM SOUTH INDIA: FOUR TAMIL POETS Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi, Sukirtharani This chapbook is edited by Meena Kandasamy, featuring new translations by her alongside some by the late Lakshmi Holmstrom, of poetry by Malathi Maithri, Salma, Kutti Revathi and Sukirtharani. Writer, feminist and activist Malathi Maithri is recognised as an important contemporary Tamil poet. She hails from Puducherry State in southern India. Salma is a writer of Tamil poetry and fiction. Based in the small town of Thuvarankurichi, she is recognised as a writer of growing importance in Tamil literature. Kutti Revathi is a Chennai-based Tamil poet, her poetry seeks to evolve a subversive language to explore and reclaim a long- colonised realm of experience – ‘the map of a Tamil woman’s body’. Sukirtharani is a prominent Dalit poet in Tamil. She is currently at work on a novel which she describes as dalit-feminist. ISBN: 9781911284260
Price: £6.00
FROM NEPAL Sulochana Manandhar Dhital This chapbook by the brilliant Nepali poet and labour activist Sulochana Manandhar is translated by Muna Gurung. Sulochana Manandhar has published three books of poetry: Jhyalkhana, Anubhitika Thopaharu and Raat, as well as several books of personal essays. She is a columnist and an instructor in the Newari and Chinese languages in Kathmandu. Muna Gurung is a writer, translator and educator based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Her fiction, non-fiction and translated works have appeared in The Margins, Himal Southasian, Words Without Borders, La.Lit, The Record and No Tokens. Muna was a 2015 Asian American Writers Workshop Margins Fellow, and is the founder of KathaSatha. ISBN: 9781911284246
Price: £6.00
FROM VIETNAM Nhã Thuyên A poetry collection and a poetic feminine body essay by writer and publisher Nhã Thuyên, translated from the Vietnamese by Kaitlin Rees. Nhã Thuyên has authored several books of poetry, short fiction and some tiny books for children. Their most recent poetry book words breathe, creatures of elsewhere was published in English translation by Kaitlin Rees (Vagabond Press, 2016). Kaitlin Rees, born in Wampsville, has been moving between New York and Hanoi since 2011. With Nhã Thuyên she founded AJAR, a small bilingual publisher with an online journal and a poetry festival. ISBN: 9781911284222
Price: £6.00
THE EDEN BOOK SOCIETY
DEAD INK REINVENT CLASSIC HORROR FOR A CONTEMPORARY AUDIENCE Established in 1919, The Eden Book Society was a private publisher of horror for nearly 100 years. Presided over by the Eden family, the press passed through the generations publishing short horror novellas to a private list of subscribers. Eden books were always published under pseudonyms and, until now, have never been available to the public. But sometimes things are not always what they seem...
JUDDERMAN D.A. Northwood London, early-1970s. In a city plagued by football violence, Republican bombings, blackouts and virulent racism, a new urban myth is taking hold. Among the broken down estates, crumbling squats and failed projects of a dying metropolis, whispered sightings of a malevolent figure nicknamed the Judderman are spreading. A manifestation of the sick psyche of a city, or something else? ISBN: 9781911585466 Price: £5.99
A DEDICATED FRIEND Shirley Longford Organ donation is in its infancy and Daisy Howard, who is giving a kidney to her aunt, is in the hands of a pioneering surgeon. After the operation, Daisy is desperate to get back to her family, yet the days go by and she remains in the hospital; meanwhile, an old friend keeps visiting with news of home, and Daisy becomes increasingly uneasy. ISBN: 9781911585442 Price: £5.99
HOLT HOUSE L.G. Vey It’s a quiet house, sheltered, standing in a mass of tangled old trees called the Holtwood. Raymond watches it. He’s been watching it, through a gap in the fence at the bottom of the garden, for weeks. Thinking about the elderly owners, Mr and Mrs Latch, who took him in one night when he was a frightened boy caught up in an emergency. Mr Latch showed him something that was kept in a wardrobe in the spare room. He can’t remember what it was. He only knows how sick it made him feel. Raymond watches Holt House. He has to remember what he saw. He has to get inside. ISBN: 9781911585428 Price: £5.99
JACARANDA BOOKS
ONE TO WATCH: THE SMALL PUBLISHER WITH BIG AMBITIONS Jacaranda Books are a fresh and exciting new independent publishing house based in London. They publish adult fiction and non-fiction, including illustrated books, which cross linguistic, racial, gender and cultural boundaries. Through their authors and books, they seek to promote provocative, inspirational writing that shines a light on issues affecting ethnic minorities, women, and young people, and tackles contemporary social issues. At the heart of their publishing strategy is one core element - a love of outstanding, thought-provoking work. They believe that a wealth of unheard, under-represented voices exist globally and are ready to be discovered. It is their mission to create the space for those voices to be seen and heard by new readers. Rest in Power, Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin Five years after his tragic death, Travyon Martin has become a symbol of social justice activism, as has his hauntingly familiar image: the photo of a young man, wearing his favourite hoodie and gazing silently at the camera. But who was Trayvon Martin, before he became an icon? And how did one black child’s death become the match that lit a civil rights movement? Rest in Power, told through the compelling alternating narratives of his parents Sybrina Fulton and Tracy Martin, answers those questions from the most intimate of sources. It’s the story of the beautiful and complex child they lost, the cruel unresponsiveness of the police and the hostility of the legal system, and the inspiring journey they took from grief and pain to power, and from tragedy and senselessness to meaning. PB | £12.99 | 9781909762572 | 11th February 2017
The Reactive, Masande Ntshanga [Winner of the 2018 Betty Trask Award] In a city that has lost its shimmer, Lindanathi and his two friends Ruan and Cecelia sell illegal pharmaceuticals while chasing their next high. Lindanathi, deeply troubled by his hand in his brother’s death, has turned his back on his family, until a message from home reminds him of a promise he made years before. When a puzzling masked man enters their lives, Lindanathi is faced with a decision: continue his life in Cape Town, or return to his family and to all he has left behind. Rendered in lyrical, bright prose and set in a not-so-new South Africa, The Reactive is a poignant, life-affirming story about secrets, memories and the redemption that comes from facing what haunts us most. PB | £8.99 | 9781909762596 | 14th September 2017
Thinner than Skin, Uzma Aslam Khan “Smart, fierce, and poignant: perhaps the most exciting novel yet by this very talented writer.” Mohsin Hamid, author of Exit West and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Up in the glaciers of Northern Pakistan, a tragedy at a mountain lake entwines the fates of the two lovers with the people they encounter there: Miryam, a nomad, travelling with her family into the mountains to escape persecution, and Irfan, haunted by ghosts and hoping that the mountains may offer him a reprieve from his troubles. An expansive look at the intersection of cultures and what happens at those intersections, Thinner Than Skin is a powerful and moving read. HB | £16.99 | 9781909762671 | 5th April 2018
POETRY RISING STARS
REINVIGORATE YOUR POETRY SHELVES WITH WORK BY YOUNG & DIVERSE WRITERS
As Slow as Possible Kit Fan
Fondue A.K. Blakemore
Kit Fan’s As Slow As Possible is a book of changes, of unlikely bridges between far-flung places and times, a collection of shape-shifting, trans-migrant poems that travel across geographies and time zones.
In these louche, candid poems, bearing the marks of Mary Ruefle, Emily Dickinson and The Smiths, the inner life prowls, smoking a cigarette, as the fantasies of sex and violence allowed to play out in the subjugations that have long been the poet’s concerns.
Arc Publications 6th August 2018
There are poems about the slow life of trees which establish links across time and space, about environmental catastrophe, art in war zones, artworks that travel across time, all of them reflecting on mortality and survival.
Kit Fan was born in Hong Kong and moved to the UK at the age of 21. As his poetry moves between Hong Kong and European cultural histories, he also moves amphibiously between poetry and narrative fiction. He lives in York.
Offord Road Books 5th July 2018
Tigerish, impetuous, quick-witted and never self pitying, Fondue reaffirms Blakemore’s place on the barricades. ISBN: 9781999930431 Price: £10.00
ISBN: 9781911469438 Price: £9.99
CONTACT YOUR LOCAL REP FOR A COMPLETE LIST.
A. K. Blakemore was born in London in 1991. Twice named a Foyle Young Poet of the Year, her work has been widely published and anthologised. Her second full-length collection, Fondue, will be published by Offord Road Books.
WAR TO WINDRUSH Stephen Bourne Commemorating the 70th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush, Stephen Bourne’s War to Windrush explores the lives of Britain’s immigrant community through the experiences of Black British women during the period spanning from the beginning of World War II to the arrival of the Empire Windrush in 1948. In those short years, Black British women performed integral roles in keeping the country functioning and set the stage for the arrival of other black Britons on the MV Empire Windrush. The book shows first-hand what life was like in Britain for black women through photography and evocative prose. War to Windrush retraces the history of those women who helped to build the great, multicultural Britain we know today. It is a celebration of multiculturalism and immigration, much needed in today’s political climate.
JACARANDA BOOKS | £12.99 | 9781909762855 PB | 226PP | 22 JUNE 2018 | BRITISH HISTORY
BONES OF EMPIRE Stephen Savile & Aaron Rosenberg The only magic left comes from consuming the dead. Long ago, Ritakhou was a flourishing empire filled with light, life, and magic. Then came the Schism. Now the kingdom is called Rimbaku and is a pale shadow of its former self, a land stripped of its glory and its power. The only magic left comes from aitachi, the Relicant Touch—the ability to absorb skills and memories by consuming the bones of the dead. Throughout the land, status and success are based on one’s aitachi and the aishone or relic bones one can attain, and the so-called Relicant Empire has grown stale and stagnant as a result. The brothers Kagiri and Noniki set out from their small village with a handful of aishone and a great deal of hope. They soon find the world a bigger, darker place than they imagined, and are forced to accept a dangerous proposal, one that will put both of them at risk for not only their lives but their very souls.
SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781911390558 PB | 532PP | 1 AUGUST 2018 | FANTASY FICTION
DEDALUS Chris McCabe “Friday’s children would be fattening like seals across the sand, on their way to class. Black liquorice teeth. Loving and giving under the whalefeed of the clouds. He had to teach.” Friday 17th June 1904. Stephen Dedalus wakes up in a Dublin Martello tower, hungover but with winnings in the pocket of his borrowed trousers. Dedalus goes about his day. Settling scores and debts. Pursued by the ghosts of his mother, Hamlet, and now a man called Leopold Bloom who has woken up with plans for him. The young poet weaves hopes and ideas into burning wings of ambition. Can he elude death in the passages of books? Chris McCabe’s iconoclastic tribute to James Joyce’s masterpiece gives right-ofreply to his self-portrait, Stephen Dedalus. Stephen and Bloom, cut from Joyce’s ego, become cultural types pasted into Digital Age storytelling.
HENNINGHAM FAMILY PRESS | £12.99 | 9781999797423 PB | 200PP | 1 AUGUST 2018 | FICTION
6
2018 BESTSELLERS
EXIRE Helen Mort “Addictively sinister.” Mark Haddon Exire is not a novel. It is not a collection of short stories. It is, instead, both of these things: stories that may stand alone whilst being inextricably tied together. It is Helen Mort’s first foray into the world of fiction beyond poetry. Exire: Dystopian Britain, the year unspecified. A new website, Exire, offers those who feel disconnected from their lives one last act of choice, packaged as a bespoke service. In this unsettling collection, voices fade in and out, people connected by Exire’s troubling appeal. At the heart of it all is Lorna, a young musician who has made a painful decision. We hear her story in reverse. The is the first fiction book by the popular poet. Her debut novel, Black Car Burning, will be published by Vintage in March 2019.
WRECKING BALL PRESS | £12.00 | 9781903110591 PB | 10 SEPTEMBER 2018 | FICTION The Games
THE GAMES Harry Josephine Giles
Harry Josephine Giles
Harry Josephine Giles
The Games is a book of play with language. In Scots and English, it mucks about with sound poetry, found poetry, computer-generated poetry, dirty poetry and other ways to blur and bust the borders of genre. Its themes are ecology, power and sex: how can you have fun in a system that’s trying to take power away from you? The Games
The Games makes and breaks rules in an effort to live a full life in a full world. As a poet, Harry Josephine Gilles has toured North America, given feature performances at venues from the Bowery Poetry Club to the Soho Theatre and hosted events at festivals from StAnza to Edinburgh’s Hogmanay. They won the IdeasTap National Poetry Competition in 2012, and their first collection Tonguit (Freight Books) was shortlisted for both the Edward Morgan Poetry Award (2014) and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection (2016). Other publications include the pamphlets Visa Wedding (2012) and Oam (Stewed Rhubarb).
OUT-SPOKEN PRESS | £8.99 | 9781999679200 PB | 92PP | 24 SEPTEMBER 2018 | POETRY
NOW, NOW, LOUISON Jean Frémon (translated by Cole Swensen) “A truly wonderful book.” Siri Hustvedt It was only late in her life that Louise Bourgeois was recognized as one of the greatest artists of our time. The art world’s grande dame and its shameless old lady, spinning personal history into works of profound strangeness, speaks out with her characteristic insolence and wit, through the words of a most discrete, masterful writer. A phosphorescent poem-in-prose describing Bourgeois’s inner life as only one artist regarding another can. From her childhood in France to her exile and adult life in America, to her death, through the moods, barbs, resentments, reservations and back, at full speed. “An highly original, sensitive text.” Libération “Jean Frémon brings Louise Bourgeois close into a fascinating and moving p roximity.” ArtPress
LES FUGITIVES | £12.00 | 9780993009389 PB | 128PP | 24 SEPTEMBER 2018 | FICTION
7
OCTOBER KEY TITLE
SPELLS Sarah Shin & Rebecca Tamรกs (ed.) Spells are poems; poetry is spelling. Spell-poems take us into a place where the right words can influence the universe. Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry brings together 30 contemporary voices exploring the territory between the occult and the subversion of patriarchy. Occult poetics is a method of self-determination and transformation through a summoning of the world, through remaking reality. Capable of holding the contradictions of identity and trauma, poetry as magical language is talismanic, offering a sacred space away from everyday experiences of oppression. Spells honours the world of feeling, the world of the unconscious, the world of the body: desires and practices that are messy and diverse, as well as joyful, fun and celebratory. Contains new work by: Kaveh Akbar, Rachael Allen, Nuar Alsadir, Khairani Barokka, Emily Berry, A.K. Blakemore, Jen Calleja, Vahni Capildeo, Kayo Chingonyi, Elinor Cleghorn, CAConrad, Nia Davies, Kate Duckney, Livia Franchini, Will Harris, Caspar Heinemann, Lucy Ives, Rebecca May Johnson, Bhanu Kapil, Amy Key, Daisy Lafarge, Dorothea Lasky, Ursula K. Le Guin, Francesca Lisette, Canisia Lubrin, Karen McCarthy Woolf, Lucy Mercer, Hoa Nguyen, Rebecca Perry, Nat Raha, Nisha Ramayya, Ariana Reines, Sophie Robinson, Erica Scourti, Dolly Turing & Jane Yeh.
IGNOTA | ยฃ12.99 | 9781999675905 PB | 144PP | 31 OCTOBER 2018
8
• •
POETRY
THE AQI David Tait New from the author of Self-Portrait with The Happiness (9781910367001). “Poems at once both intimate and global.” Andrew McMillan
The AQI is a collection that speaks to, and confronts, very contemporary concerns about air pollution and our changing relationship with the environment, cultural differences, human rights (particularly LGBT issues), and how to find calm and happiness in a changing and often frightening world. At once intimate and global, The AQI is a poignant and thought-provoking collection from the critically acclaimed poet, David Tait. David Tait lives in Nanjing, China, where he works in education. His first collection Self-Portrait with The Happiness (2014) was shortlisted for The Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and received an Eric Gregory Award from The Society of Authors. His pamphlet Three Dragon Day (2015) was chosen as a winner in the Poetry Business Pamphlet Competition, and was shortlisted for The Michael Marks Award.
SMITH | DOORSTOP | £9.95 | 9781910367919 PB | 78PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
AS MOON AND MOTHER COLLIDE Mary Melvin Geoghegan •
New from the author of Say it Like a Paragraph (9781905374359).
“The poems of Mary Melvin Geoghegan are struck with a new vitality derived from the poet’s rootedness in a highly contemporary world. The maternal psyche is explored delicately, throughout this collection and the nature of of human inconsistency. There is Dublin and a memory of the Phibsboro mart, The National Gallery and Monet, Madrid and the art of Picasso and Kandisky, and through the poems she draws the reader on to examine the ways in which an artist’s fury ‘first scythed through the pain’. [...] The work is fresh, sensitive and does not shirk from the emotional pull which surely is the foundation of good poetry.” Mary O’Donnell Mary Melvin Geoghegan was born in Dublin and lives in County Longford. She has four previous collections of poetry.
SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781912561193 PB | 86PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
THE BRIGHT ROOM Michael McCarthy • •
New from the author of The Healing Station (9781910367346), which was Hilary Mantel’s Guardian Book of the Year in 2015. The author will be reading at various festivals following the launch.
The Bright Room brings together poems written over the last decade. This outstanding book confirms Michael McCarthy as an insightful storyteller, often drawing on his childhood in rural Ireland. Wise and grounded in the everyday the poems nevertheless celebrate the numinous moments in all our lives. The Bright Room is Michael McCarthy’s fourth full collection. His first, Birds’ Nests and Other Poems, won the Patrick Kavanagh Award. His second, At the Races was the overall winner of The Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet competition judged by Michael Longley. He was born in West Cork and works as a Priest in North Yorkshire.
SMITH | DOORSTOP | £9.95 | 9781912196159 PB | 70PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
9
COSMOCARTOGRAPHY Ciarán Hodgers • •
An anticipated debut from a multi award-winning Irish poet. A prolific performance poet who has read all round the country.
Cosmocartography is a poetry collection about proving yourself wrong, of stepping out of silence, of mapping your life out like a constellation to try and make sense of it. It details the ways in which we can encounter love, through family, friends, sex, ideas and the natural world, as means of resistance against abuse, grief, challenge and isolation. Ciarán Hodgers is an Irish poet working and living in the UK. Having cut his teeth in Cheshire, Manchester and Salford he’s performed at Guy Garvey’s Meltdown Festival in the Southbank Centre, FLARE Festival, Lingo Festival Dublin, the London Irish Centre, the John Ryland’s Library for the European Science Open Forum, the launch of Before Passing by great weather for media, the launch of Gerry Potter’s The Story Chair, Manchester Political Pride, Threshold Festival Liverpool and in the Royal Albert Hall at the Hammer & Tongue National Slam Final.
BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911570530 PB | 1 OCTOBER 2018
DEFENSE OF THE IDOL Omar Cáceres (translated by Mónica de la Torre) • •
A cult poet in the Chilean avant-garde “The poet makes the case for the need to experience a different world. “ Vicente Huidobro
Branded a “poète maudit” for the cryptic circumstances surrounding his life and death, Omar Cáceres once tried to destroy all copies of his one and only book. The myth around him survived thanks to the inclusion of fifteen poems from Defense of the Idol in the groundbreaking anthology Antología de poesía chilena nueva from 1935. Presented here for the first time in English translation, along with the sole foreword Vicente Huidobro ever wrote for a poet, the poems of Cáceres possess a ghostly, metaphysical energy combined with modern-age imagery: bows pulsate, moons hurtle, rains sing, trees drag their shadows in drunk stupors, winds break the sky open. But the interior life of the poet assumes dominance, interrogated through anguished, turbulent dreamscapes of language.
UGLY DUCKLING PRESS | £12.00 | 9781946433039 PB | PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
FUTURES PASS John W. Sexton • •
New from the author of five previous poetry collections, including The Offspring and the Moon (9781908836281). He is a past nominee for The Hennessy Literary Award.
In the poems of Futures Pass, born from a personal experiment into channelling a prosodic alter-ego, John W. Sexton ranges from the formal to the projective – out of this world, and out of his mind. From famous mice to an entropic rose, from a transubstantiated piano to the final vision of Saint Aquinas, from elegies for Michael Jackson to Neda Agha-Soltan, these poems provide a map from the past and the future to the eternal now. John W. Sexton was born in 1958 and is the author of five previous poetry collections: The Prince’s Brief Career, Shadows Bloom, Vortex, Petit Mal, and The Offspring of the Moon.
SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781912561179 PB | 104PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
10
• •
A strange, captivating collection from a Latvian poet. His work has been translated into English, German, French, Russian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, and Croatian.
Gestures is a collection of prose poems connecting seemingly distinct elements, found either in urban space or in the realms of cultural history. Some readers, who had a chance to experience these ghostly constellations their original Latvian, complained that they cast a melancholic spell. Descriptions of landscapes and people pose no consoling effect, instead they function as darkened reflections of complex human emotions, trying to escape metaphysical abstractions. Cadence is there, but lyricism is not its master. Artis Ostups is the author of the poetry collections Comrade Snow, Photography and Scissors, and Gestures. In addition to poetry, he writes literary criticism. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the online magazine Punctum.
UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE | £12.00 | 9781937027902 PB | 1 OCTOBER 2018
GOD WAS RIGHT Diana Hamilton •
“Diana Hamilton writes poems mostly about everything that is intimate [ . . . ] her work offers a sort of antidote to anxiety.” Marie Buck
God Was Right collects poems that take the form of arguments, essays, and letters. The title poem argues that God was right to make us love cats (and then watch them die); another categories the way women like to be kissed; one proposes a sex ed that takes into account persuasion and pleasure; another argues men should write bad poetry; a letter tries to put friendship about love; a five-paragraph essay tries to disarm heartbreak via analysis; etc. These poems/essays are hyperbolic attempts to write something adequate to a feeling. Diana Hamilton is the author of two books of poetry - God Was Right and Okay, Okay (Truck Books) - and four chapbooks: Universe, Some Shit Advice, 23 Women to Kiss Before You Die, and Break Up.
UGLY DUCKLING PRESSE | £14.00 | 9781946433046 PB | 1 OCTOBER 2018
HIP HIND HOOK Nigel Pantling • •
A collection that de-mystifies everyday life in the Army, especially outside of war-time. Based on personal experience it offers a nuanced perspective that refuses to neither glorify nor demonise the Army.
Hip Hind Hook catches the strange unsettling tension of the Cold War, and the idiosyncrasies of regimental life at the eastern border of democracy. Like Nigel Pantling’s previous collection Kingdom Power Glory (ISBN: 9781910367605), this pamphlet draws on the danger, the absurdity and the human frailty that he has seen at first hand. Nigel Pantling served as an officer in the Royal Artillery in the British Army Of the Rhine during the Cold War. In his previous poetry collection Nigel wrote about his experience as a soldier in Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles’, as a Home Office civil servant under the Thatcher Government, and as a merchant banker during the years of rampant mergers and acquisitions of the 90’s.
SMITH | DOORSTOP | £5.00 | 9781912196166 PB | 36PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
11
POETRY
GESTURES Artis Ostups (translated by Jayde Will)
LES CHAMBRES Louis Aragon • •
The first English translation of the last collection by a major French poet. Author of Anicet Or The Panorama (ISBN: 9781900565691).
Published in 1969, Les Chambres was Louis Aragon’s last collection. Subtitled poème du temps qui ne passe pas, it is a beautiful and melancholy meditation on time, age and love, a last gift to his wife Elsa Triolet who died the following year. Louis Aragon 1897-1982 was one of the most important French poets of the twentieth-century. In the 1920s he was one of the leaders of the Dadaist and Surrealist movements in Paris. In the 1930s he edited the anti-Fascist journal Commune and the French Communist Party newspaper Ce Soir. During the German Occupation he was active in the Resistance, and was later awarded the Croix de Guerre. After the War he edited Les Lettres Françaises and won the Lenin Peace Prize. He wrote over fifty books, and was nominated four times for the Nobel Prize, many of his poems have been set to music by musicians, notably George Brassens, Isabelle Aubret, Léo Ferré and Jean Ferrat.
SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781999827656 PB | 100PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
LIES Doireann Ní Ghríofa • •
New from the author of Clasp. (ISBN: 9781910251027) “[Ní Ghríofa] achieves the feat of making us look again at the usual and illuminating its pulsating strangeness.” Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Ireland Professor of Poetry
Intimate moments carefully re-appraised (first dates, break ups, young parenthood, etc.) are the raw material of these vivid and wholly engaging poems, written in Irish, and translated here by the author – a process that itself raises questions about poetry and truth. But the real achievement of Ní Ghríofa’s work is the way in which she keeps her personal history open to the wider world, to the imaginative encounters that animate so many of the poems, to an acute awareness of the restless nature of language itself, and not least to the women who preceded her and who remain a steadying and guiding presence throughout. Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a bilingual writer. Among her awards are the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Seamus Heaney Fellowship.
DEDALUS PRESS | £11.00 | 9781910251393 PB | 48PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
NAVIGATION Kate Carruthers Thomas •
Debut collection from an award-winning poet.
Addressing experiences of displacement and connection to both place and to people, the poems in Navigation traverse landscape and memory, mingling the two. From the sediments of natural structures to the erosion of memory, Kate Carruthers Thomas uses beautifully controlled metaphor to explore the tensions between familiarity and strangeness, whether in how we perceive the world or in the changing dynamics in relationships. Poised, honed and sharply observed, with a feeling for what goes on beneath the surface of things, Navigation is an outstanding debut collection. Kate Carruthers Thomas’s poems have won awards in the Kent and Sussex Poetry Society Open and East Riding Poetry competitions and been shortlisted in the Cinnamon Press Debut Collection Competition. She is a graduate of the Cinnamon Press Mentoring Scheme and her poems have been published in Envoi and the Cinnamon anthologies May Day and Trio. This is her first solo collection.
CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781788640213 PB | 50PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
12
•
“His poetry is a balance of different voices, full of verbal and imagistic delight.” Philip Gross
Dennis Casling read English at Nottingham University and took an MA in Medieval Studies at Bristol. He worked as a schoolteacher, college lecturer and finally a consultant and trainer in the fields of Social Care, Education and the Arts. He was overall winner of the Poetry Business Competition (2000) for his collection, Endorphin Angels, which became a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2001. He continued to publish in poetry magazines, including The North, Rialto, Poetry London and Poetry Review until his death in 2016.
SMITH | DOORSTOP | £9.95 | 9781910367926 PB | 119PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
NOSEBLEEDS Isaiah Hull • •
Debut collection from a spoken work poet from Old Trafford who was one of the Roundhouse and BBC Radio 1Xtra’s Words First finalists. He has supported Kate Tempest, Lemn Sissay, and Skepta at major events for the BBC.
Nosebleeds is an exploration of expression, traversing emotion and form. It is hard-hitting poetry, written to be spoken aloud but making the transfer to the page with remarkable ease and clarity. Visceral and raw words from a voice far older than the poet’s young years, exploring family, life, and the real world beyond the sophomoric aphorisms of a generation in England’s north presented by the media. Inspired by Saul Williams, Philip Larkin, and classical Greek tragedies, Isaiah Hull’s writing is soul-searching and down to earth.
WRECKING BALL PRESS | £10.00 | 9781903110614 PB | 1 OCTOBER 2018
NOTIONS John Kelly •
“These are very remarkable and compelling poems. With strong narratives and events, vivid and surprising language, and a marvellous square-on exactness.” Bernard O’Donoghue
Constantly inventive yet unerringly precise, the cool-headed poems in John Kelly’s long-overdue debut reveal an author equally at home in the closely observed standalone lyric and in the longer apparently improvisational pieces that contribute so much to this book’s extraordinary brio and style. John Kelly was born in Enniskillen in 1965 and has long since lived in Dublin. An award-winning broadcaster and fiction writer, he has been publishing poetry for many years with his work featuring in many journals and anthologies including The New Young Irish Poets. His fiction titles include From Out of the City, shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Bord Gáis Irish Book Awards in 2014. A radio play, The Pipes, was broadcast by RTÉ. Notions is his first poetry collection.
DEDALUS PRESS | £11.00 | 9781910251416 PB | 84PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
13
POETRY
NEW & SELECTED POEMS Dennis Casling
THE PERSEVERANCE Raymond Antrobus • •
Much-anticipated full debut from one of the UK’s most hotly-tipped young poets. Personal poems about deafness, the d/Deaf experience, loss and race.
An extraordinary debut from a young British-Jamaican poet, The Perseverance is a book of loss, language and praise. One of the most crucial new voices to emerge from Britain, Raymond Antrobus explores the d/Deaf experience, the death of his father and the failure to communicate. Ranging across history, time zones and continents, The Perseverance operates in the in betweens – of dual heritages, of form and expression – emerging to show us what it means to exist, and to flourish. Raymond Antrobus is a British-Jamaican poet, performer, editor and educator. He has published two pamphlets, Shapes & Disfigurements Of Raymond Antrobus (Burning Eye, 2012) and To Sweeten Bitter (Outspoken Press, 2017).
PENNED IN THE MARGINS | £9.99 | 9781908058522 PB | 90PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
SEA POETICS Patricia Helen Wooldridge •
Skilful, evocative and compelling, Patricia Helen Wooldridge is an elegant debut voice.
Lyrical, personal, but always accessible, Sea Poetics is imbued with a deep feeling for the natural world. Wooldridge approaches poetry as though it is a painting, inspired by an experience of light or a moment that focuses attention, words are her canvas and the sea and sky her frequent themes, often leading to explorations of how individual experience relates to the macro scale of the universe. Her fresh images distil moments with skill and delicacy, pulling the reader into a shared emotional response. Patricia Helen Wooldridge lives in Hampshire and is inspired by walking, bird watching and working on her allotment. Her work has appeared in poetry journals and competition anthologies. Most notably she received a commendation in the National Poetry Competition 2013 and in 2016 she was awarded first prize in the Kent and Sussex Open Poetry Competition.
CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781788640220 PB | 60PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
SMITTEN SOUL Gabriel Fitzmaurice • •
A frank account of spiritual struggle in the modern world. “A wonderfully coherent and satisfying collection.” Bernard O’Donoghue
Smitten Soul is the story of a soul. Poetry, like prayer, should be strong enough to stand up to the dark, hence this collection is subtitled “Illuminating the Dark”. The poems in this book have been collected from a lifetime of writing: they progress from spiritual poverty through the dark night of the senses to the celebration of a soul that has found rest. Along the way, this soul wrestles with a Church it has lost faith in, the decline of religion, and ideas of truth and beauty challenged by the modern world. The lone soul journeys through these poems, eventually finding the grace of a community in prayer. Gabriel Fitzmaurice was born, in 1952, in the village of Moyvane, Co. Kerry where he still lives. He is author of more than fifty books, including collections of poetry in English and Irish as well as several collections of verse for children.
SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781912561087 PB | 80PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
14
• •
A poetic dialogue with a young Jewish girl, Fientje Abram, who was murdered during the Nazi occupation of Holland. A compelling and terrible book about xenophobia, cultural amnesia and public memory.
Between 1940 and 1945 over 100,000 Jews were deported from the Netherlands and murdered. One of these was Sientje Abram, an eleven year-old girl from Amsterdam who was killed at Auschwitz in 1942. Guus Luijters first came across Sientje’s name when he was writing a book about the 18,000 Dutch children murdered during the German Occupation, but he could find out nothing about her. All those who knew her were also killed and unlike Anne Frank, she left no written records. Then one night Sientje started a poetic dialogue with Luijters. The result is Song of Stars. Guus Luijters is a historian, writer and poet. He was born in 1943. He has published more than thirty books.
SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £8.99 | 9781999827670 PB | 164PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
THE TRUE STORY OF THE COWBOY HAT & THE INGÉNUE Maria Jastrzebska •
A haunting tale, told in a series of visionary prose poems.
In a landscape scarred by conflict, two women begin a quest for a lost child and a lost world of peace. Bound together by love and acceptance, their story and path interweave with fellow outcasts — people like the ever-suave Dame Blanche, Sister Asunta, martial artist and magician, Master Wu Wu, and the lost soul, Tulip — but whether peace is simply the end of war or something deeper is something they must discover for themselves. Maria Jastrzebska is a Polish-born poet, editor and translator. Her most recent collection was At The Library of Memories (Waterloo Press 2013) and her selected poems, The Cedars of Walpole Park, have been translated into Polish by Anna Blasiak, Pawel Gawronski and Wioletta Grzegorzewska and published bilingually (Stowarzyszenie Zywych Poetow, 2015). She lives in Brighton.
CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781911540038 PB | 55PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
THE WEATHER IN NORMAL Carrie Etter • •
New from the prize-winning author of Imagined Sons (9781781721513), shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Winter 2018.
In her collection The Weather in Normal, Carrie Etter laments the loss of her hometown of Normal, Illinois through the death of her parents, the sale of the family home, and the effects of climate change on Illinois’ landscape and lives. The author’s restlessly inventive use of multiple tones, shifting line lengths, and fresh turns of phrase are as much a means of conveying complex and paradoxical emotions as they are a determined formal strategy to avoid cliché. Carrie Etter lived her first nineteen years in Normal, Illinoiss She moved to England in 2001 and began teaching in 2004 at Bath Spa University, where she is a Reader in Creative Writing. She has published three previous collections of poems.
SEREN | £9.99 | 9781781724590 PB | 72PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
15
POETRY
SONG OF STARS Guus Luijters
THE HEALING NEXT TIME Roy McFarlane
COVER COMING SOON
• •
Second collection from the author of Beginning With Your Last Breath (9781911027089). He is a former Birmingham Poet Laureate and has a large, enthusiastic fanbase across the Midlands.
Roy McFarlane presents his second poetry collection The Healing Next Time, a timely and unparalleled book of interwoven sequences on institutional racism, deaths in custody and of a life story set against the ever-changing backdrop of turnof-the-21st-century Birmingham. Here forms a potent and resolute narrative in lyrical and multidimensional poems that refuse to look the other way or accept the whitewashed version of events. Roy McFarlane was born in Birmingham of Jamaican parentage and lives in Wolverhampton. Roy’s writing has appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Out of Bounds (Bloodaxe 2012) and he is the writer and editor of Celebrate Wha?
NINE ARCHES PRESS | £9.99 | 9781911027454 PB | 72PP | 4 OCTOBER 2018
UNWRITTEN: CARIBBEAN POEMS AFTER WORLD WAR I Karen McCarthy Woolf (ed.) •
Co-commissioned by 14-18 NOW, BBC Contains Strong Language and the British Council.
With contributions from Jay Bernard, Malika Booker, Kat Francois, Jay T. John, Anthony Joseph, Ishion Hutchinson, Charnell Lucien, Vladimir Lucien, Rachel Manley, Tanya Shirley and Karen McCarthy Woolf. Britain’s First World War poets changed the way we view military conflict and had a deep impact on the national psyche. Yet the stories of the 15,600 volunteers who signed up to the British West Indian Regiment remain largely unknown. The Unwritten Poems project invited contemporary Caribbean poets to explore the nature of war and humanity – as it exists now, and at a time when Britain’s colonial ambitions were still at a peak. Unwritten is the result and also includes new material written for broadcast and live performance.
NINE ARCHES PRESS | £14.99 | 9781911027294 PB | 160PP | 4 OCTOBER 2018
A BENCH FOR BILLIE HOLIDAY James Nash • •
Sequel to Some Things Matter: 63 Sonnets (2012), which has sold more than 1500 copies to date. The perfect middle-ground between literary sophistication and accessibility.
In A Bench for Billie Holiday, James Nash tenderly retraces seventy years of life through seventy new sonnets. Whether lightly sketching moments of truth or revisiting his younger self with the benefit of insight and experience, he imbues each fourteen-line fragment with wit, wisdom and wonder. A perfect follow-up to his beloved first volume of sonnets, Some Things Matter, this book adds new breadth and depth to the work of one of Yorkshire’s most popular poets. James Nash was born in London in 1949, and has been a resident of Leeds since 1971. He is a well-known provider of creative writing workshops in schools, universities and the community, and is a regular host of literary events.
VALLEY PRESS | £9.99 | 9781912436095 PB | 88PP | 5 OCTOBER 2018
16
• •
A new collection of the translated works of the Italian poet Giovanni Pascoli. An Italian literary award, the Pascoli Prize, was established in 1962 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death.
The poetry of Giovanni Pascoli interested Seamus Heaney as well as generations of Italian schoolchildren. Danielle Hope, who has lived in Pascoli’s Romagna, offers a new translation and commentary – illustrated with paintings by Frances Wilson. Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912) was arguably the greatest Italian poet writing at the beginning of the twentieth century. While certainly no Modernist, his almost imagistic focus on piccole cose (small things) and his scaling back of the era’s grandiose language and rhetoric both contributed to the modernization of Italian poetry.
ROCKINGHAM PRESS | £9.99 | 9781904851776 PB | 48PP | 5 OCTOBER 2018
SLEEPLESS Julia Deakin • •
“Crafted, tender poems, written with passion and purpose.” Simon Armitage “Real linguistic inventiveness.” Ian McMillan
Ours is a restless age. At one extreme, 24/7 corporate culture and social media addiction leave many unable to literally and metaphorically switch off; at the other, millions are roaming continents in fear of their lives while looking for a safe place to rest. In Sleepless, poet Julia Deakin tirelessly questions how we have come to this exhausting impasse. Her hard-hitting, wryly humorous and intensely humane collection probes our emotions, digs deep for grains of common sense and plumbs the depths of our conscience to ascertain how truly awake we really are. Julia Deakin was born in Nuneaton and meandered north to Huddersfield where she taught, married, did a poetry MA and took up ice skating. Her collections include The Half-Mile-High Club & Without a Dog and Eleven Wonders.
VALLEY PRESS | £10.99 | 9781912436101 PB | 96PP | 11 OCTOBER 2018
FULL STOPS IN WINTER BRANCHES Char March • •
Contemporary, accessible poetry that isn’t all bleak and that has a great sense of humour. “To read the work of Char March is always a pleasure; a rare example of a poet who never forgets her reader.” Deborah Alma
In this, her fifth collection, Char March is searching for hidden nests of humanity within the cold, bare branches of politics, and giving a voice to the voiceless (both human and otherwise). She expertly immerses us in the landscapes and soundscapes of her twin homes of Scotland and Yorkshire. This is poetry at its very best, highly-involved writing that seems effortless; a feast of fantastic literature to warm your soul. Char March grew up in Scotland’s run-down industrial belt in the 1960s, and now divides her time between the Yorkshire Pennines and Lochaber. She is a multi-award-winning author, with five poetry collections to her name.
VALLEY PRESS | £9.99 | 9781912436118 PB | 80PP | 18 OCTOBER 2018
17
POETRY
COVER COMING SOON
THE LAST WALK OF GIOVANNI PASCOLI Danielle Hope (trans.)
VENUS SHELLS Nadia Malik •
Debut collection from a rising star of the performance poetry scene.
Venus Shells is collection of poems about individual identity within a predominately Muslim community. Nadia Malik’s debut collection follows family, relationships and a melding of cultural ideas, mixed with rich myth and tales told in Arabic and Indonesian. Nadia Malik is a performance poet, storyteller, artist and single mum from Catford, London. Whilst not widely known outside of the capital city, Nadia’s short poetry career has landed her spots at various prestigious nights including Split the Atom and Jawdance.
BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911570554 PB | 20 OCTOBER 2018
PRECARIOUS LIVES Jean Watkins •
“Jean Watkins illustrates a particular gift for concrete detail with poems so rich in the senses that they seem to lift off the page.” The North
Precarious Lives, Jean Watkins’ second collection, celebrates the diversity of wildlife, landscape, art and human experience. Events and lives are described in sensuous detail. Throughout, the poet is conscious of our tenuous hold on life, the perennial threats we face, as well as those more recent ones inaugurated by the coming of climate change. Jean Watkins was born in West Yorkshire and has lived near Reading for many years. She gained a BA in English from Reading University in 2001. Her poems have been widely published in magazines and anthologies. She has read regularly at the town’s Poets’ Café and at various venues further afield.
TWO RIVERS PRESS | £9.99 | 9781909747418 PB | 64PP | 21 OCTOBER 2018
STOWAWAY: A LEVANTINE ADVENTURE Richard Gwyn • •
A poetic journey through the richly storied eastern Mediterranean. The collection deals with many modern topics in an inventive way, including refugees, addiction, rootlessness and homelessness.
This collection recounts a number of journeys that the stowaway of the title, a kind of anti-Ulysses, takes around the eastern Mediterranean, journeys that transcend historical time and incorporate elements of the mythic and the magical, as well as actual historical phenomena, from the fall of Byzantium to the Syrian civil war and the emergence of Islamic State or Daish. Richard Gwyn grew up in Breconshire. Following several years in London, he spent a decade travelling on and around the Mediterranean, much of it recorded in his award-winning memoir, The Vagabond’s Breakfast. He is the author of three previous collections of poetry and three novels.
Stowaway:
A Levantine Adventure
Richard Gwyn
"treads an unerringly unsteady line along the borders between dream and vivid observation, between sensual and laconic"
Philip Gross
18
SEREN | £7.99 | 9781781724583 PB | 72PP | 31 OCTOBER 2018
NOVEMBER KEY TITLE
PASTRAMI FACED RACIST Martin Rowson Undeterred by the embarrassing success of his ridiculous four-volume verse epic The Limerickiad, award-winning cartoonist Martin Rowson continues to lower the tone with a series of metrical rants and cautionary tales about contemporary political and literary life. Accompanied by the ghosts of Chesterton, Shelley, Burns and Browning, Rowson casts his gaze across the satirical spectrum from governments, gammon-faced racists, class war and the harsh realities of child rearing to the world of literary festivals, international book fairs, best-sellers, book launches, holiday reading lists, bottom lines, liggers, bloggers, blaggers, book-signings and book-burnings.
SMOKESTACK BOOKS | ÂŁ8.99 | 9781999827687 PB | 84PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
19
INLAND Kay Syrad •
Written with a graciousness of thought and an elegant control of language that makes these pieces sing, Inland marks Kay Syrad as an extraordinary poet.
Kay Syrad’s perceptive, surprising imagery and ability to see to the heart of things is never more acute than in this outstanding new collection, Inland. A novelist of psychological acuity, wit and intelligence; a collaborator with artists and musicians and a gifted editor, Kay Syrad’s formidable skill and deeply humane insights come together in her poetry to astonish, startle and delight. Kay Syrad’s publications include a collection of poetry, Double Edge, two novels, The Milliner and the Phrenologist, Send (both published by Cinnamon); and Exchange, an art-text collaboration with environmental artist, Chris Drury, based on a rural residency and exhibition for the climate change cultural organisation, Cape Farewell.
CINNAMON PRESS | £8.99 | 9781788640237 PB | 60PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
LISTENING TO THE NIGHT Jane Routh •
New collection from an poet previously shortlisted for the Forward First Collection, a PBS Recommendation & Winner of The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition.
Jane Routh’s fourth full collection combines vivid, musical writing and acute perception of the natural world. Ranging across land and land art, birds, buildings and bodies, roads, trees and winds, her distinctive poems investigate memory and the changes which overtake us all. Listening to the Night is Jane Routh’s fourth collection of poetry published by Smith|Doorstop. Circumnavigation won the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet competition and was shortlisted for the Forward First Collection Prize; Teach Yourself Mapmaking was a PBS Recommendation, followed by The Gift of Boats.
THE POETRY BUSINESS | £9.95 | 9781912196173 PB | 80PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
THE SILENCE THAT REMAINS Ghassan Zaqtan • •
A Palestinian poet living in Palestine, widely regarded as the most important poet of his generation. A bilingual text, written in both Arabic and English.
Ghassan Zaqtan is one of the most original and compelling Palestinian poets of his generation. A novelist, editor, playwright and filmmaker, he has written ten books of poetry, including Like a Straw Bird It Follows Me, awarded the Griffin International Poetry Prize in 2013. The Silence that Remains introduces readers in the UK for the first time to Zaqtan’s early work, including his debut collection destroyed during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Writing about personal memory as a form of political and social activism, while avoiding the mythology of exile and displacement, Ghassan creates an aesthetic of fragments, an imaginative archaeology of fragile human subjects. It’s a book about the silence of the tongue and the silence of the heart, the silence of resistance and the resistance of silence.
SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781999827663 PB | 280PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
20
• • •
“Gorgeous.” Sabrina Mahfouz “Knapp’s writing is light as a bird’s feather.” Lyn Gardner “Cecilia is an essential writer right now.” Scroobius Pip
In this, her debut full length collection, Cecilia Knapp takes us from Brighton’s shores, deep into her past, through countless pubs and into her bed, her poems navigating loss and grief and all its chaos and contradictions, sex, desire, love, her body and the glory of female friendship. She writes with honesty, vulnerability and warmth, her vivid images bringing a unique beauty to the every day, forever asking questions, and leaving us, always, with hope. Cecilia Knapp is a writer, poet and performer from Brighton. Her commissions have included the TATE and the BBC and she has been a guest curator at Cheltenham Literature Festival. Cecilia has delivered a TEDX talk at Warwick University and was featured in Vogue as one of the UK’s top young poets.
BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911570578 PB | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
FILIGREE: CONTEMPORARY BLACK BRITISH POETRY Nii Ayikwei Parkes •
An anthology of Black British Poetry from a mix of established and emerging poets.
Filigree typically refers to the finer elements of craftwork, the parts that are subtle; this ‘Filigree’ anthology contains work that plays with the possibilities that the word suggests, work that is delicate, that responds to the idea of edging, to a comment on the marginalisation of the darker voice. Filigree includes work from established Black British poets residing inside and outside the UK; new and younger emerging voices of Black Britain and Black poets who have made it their home as well as a selection of the Inscribe poets who we have nurtured and continue to support. They have all responded in compelling ways to the concept of ‘Filigree’.
PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £8.99 | 9781845234263 PB | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
GEN Jonathan Edwards
I..;
•
. . 1 , I
•
I .
�
,
._, -�
'
I•. f\
Eagerly awaited second collection from the Costa Prize winning author of My Family and Other Superheroes (Seren, 9781781721629). Edwards’ ability to find the interesting and extraordinary in the lives of ordinary people will make his work appeal to fans of Kim Moore and Ben Wilkinson.
This accessible and critically acclaimed young poet has beaten off ‘second collection syndrome’ with a book of sharp yet beautifully warm and humane poems. Several of the poems in Gen have already won prizes, and the book must be a contender for more shortlists. Jonathan Edwards was born and brought up in Crosskeys, South Wales. He has written speeches for the Welsh Assembly Government and journalism for The Big Issue Cymru, and currently works as an English teacher. .
Winner of the Costa Prize for Poetry 2015
SEREN | £9.99 | 9781781724736 PB | 64PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
21
POETRY
AGAINST THE SALT AIR Cecilia Knapp
STOCKHOLM SYNDROME Igor Klikovac • •
Informed by a life lived in and outside of Sarajevo, this collection articulates, among other things, the experiences of daily life during the Bosnian War (1992-95). Explores themes of immigration, refugees, political responsibility, marginalisation and persecution.
Igor Klikovac is a poet whose work is as shaped by his Sarajevo roots as by his travels: the poems, often up in the air, between places, among the clouds that increasingly pass over European nations, are brilliantly observed, ironic, densely material, then spaciously open to what he misses and remembers and can do justice to. Translated by John McAuliffe and Igor Klikovac, the selection for this pamphlet is from Igor’s third book of poetry, Stockholm Syndrome. Igor Klikovac is a Bosnian poet living in London since 1993. His work has been published in Bosnia, countries of former Yugoslavia, Britain and elsewhere.
SMITH | DOORSTOP | £5.00 | 9781912196180 PB | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
UEA CREATIVE WRITING ANTHOLOGY POETRY 2018 Various Authors •
“It’s so nice to have such a collectively-minded group on the MA this year. People will one day speak of the Norwich School...” Jeremy Noel-Tod
This volume is the record of a year of hard work, experiment, conversation, revision, and speculative play between the weight of tradition and the desire to find new ways of saying. What is immediately visible in these pages is the sheer variation in style and form, from the fragmentary and epigrammatic to the ranging and discursive, from the intimate to the global, from the playful to the elegiac. What is not visible is the mutual care and camaraderie of a group working together to encourage the emergence of each distinctive voice. Here are the UEA Poets of 2018. Remember, you read them here first.
UEA PUBLISHING PROJECT | £9.99 | 9781911343424 PB | 96PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
PENNIES ON MY EYES Wilfred Owen • •
A new, fully illustrated, collection of poetry by Wilfred Owen. Published on the centenary of his death.
Pennies on my Eyes, the latest addition to the Two Rivers Press classic poems series, is a centennial collection of Wilfred Owen’s poetry illustrated by Reading-based artists. The town made its contribution to Owen’s becoming a poet through the encouragement he received from Professor Edith Morley at the University of Reading while based in the nearby village of Dunsden. Each inspired by a work in this memorial volume, the artists offer their unique responses for this celebratory gathering of Owen’s most famous war poems, published on 4 November 2018, the 100th anniversary of the poet’s death on the Western Front at the Sambre-Oise Canal just one week before the Armistice.
TWO RIVERS PRESS | £9.99 | 9781909747449 PB | 48PP | 4 NOVEMBER 2018
22
•
An engaging and powerful debut collection.
of sirens / body & faultlines is a book of prophecy against the Brexit era. Forged within the coordinates of a post-2008 London, where crisis and austerity meet the vanity projects of the super-rich, Nat Raha’s experimental, queer lyric mobilises all aspects of language to reveal contradictions of capitalism and defuse populist rhetoric. Committed to the immediacy of a present that is precarious and under surveillance, of sirens attends to queer, transfeminist and people of colour counter-memories and histories. The book forges new expressions of desire and modes of breath, pushing against the gravities that would rather these lives and worlds disappear. Nat Raha is a poet and trans / queer activist, living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Their previous collections of poetry are countersonnets (Contraband Books, 2013) and Octet (Veer Books, 2010).
BOILER HOUSE PRESS | £11.99 | 9781911343479 PB | 120PP | 5 NOVEMBER 2018
RABBIT Sophie Robinson • •
A Poetry Book Society Wildcard Choice. “If you read one book of poems this year, let it be this!” CA Conrad
The long-awaited third collection from one of the UK’s finest, most virtuosic of modern lyric poets. These poems take the reader on surprising journeys of healing, hard-won amid personal and social vicissitudes – including triumph over addiction, and alcoholism -- and open spaces in which to share in emotional, quasi-spiritual transcendence despite. Who could ask for more? Sophie Robinson teaches Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and is the author of A and The Institute of Our Love in Disrepair. Recent work has appeared in n+1, The White Review, Poetry Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Ploughshares and BOMB Magazine.
BOILER HOUSE PRESS | £11.99 | 9781911343455 PB | 96PP | 5 NOVEMBER 2018
SELF HEAL Samantha Walton •
An exciting and eagerly anticipated full-collection debut from a hugely talented poet.
“Exuberantly raw and playful, Samantha Walton’s first collection Self Heal engages passionately with questions of identity, consumerism, gender, and humanity’s relationship to the natural environment. To self heal means to live amid a dizzying array of worldly demands, requiring all the abundance of humour, compassion, and intelligence this debut has to offer.” Carrie Etter Samantha Walton co-runs Sad Press, which specialises in chapbooks and small press editions, and has previously published five pamphlets including Animal Pomes with Crater Press. She was a Poet in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum in 2013, and in July 2015 was Poet in Residence at SoundEye Poetry Festival in Cork, Ireland. She teaches at Bath Spa University.
BOILER HOUSE PRESS | £11.99 | 9781911343462 PB | 96PP | 5 NOVEMBER 2018
23
POETRY
OF SIRENS / BODY & FAULTLINES Nat Raha
THE GREEN MONK Marcus Slease •
“Slease is a poet that reminds us the wildness of life is not something we can control or even fight against but rather something we should witness and honour.” Matthew Dickman
The Green Monk was written between London, Madrid, and Krakow, and engages thrillingly with various surrealist visions of artists and poets, including Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dali, Federico García Lorca, James Tate, and Chika Sagawa. It concerns, variously, queer erotics, animism & magic, food, death & sublime nature, fairy tales & alchemy, & the wonders of everyday life in Madrid. It is simultaneously contemporary and ancient, built on visual images and techniques of juxtaposition and collage, accompanied by entertainingly absurd narratives. These poems sit between worlds and take the reader on shamanistic journeys, healings, and transformations, through a language of migration and immigration, across various physical and imaginary, spatial and temporal, fields.
BOILER HOUSE PRESS | £11.99 | 9781911343486 PB | 96PP | 5 NOVEMBER 2018
THE LIFE THAT I HAVE Knute Skinner •
New from the award-winning author of Concerned Attentions (ISBN: 9781908836601).
“Whether a couple at breakfast recollecting a first meeting, or a man confronting a life-quandary proposed by a half-eaten apple, or the poet himself considering the “thin hold” of a fallen limb on his garden’s cypress tree, the lives captured so intensively in Skinner’s poems never fail to glimpse and record the “fine print” of the soul. The flames confined behind the grate in his marvelous poem “The Fire” “would consume the world,” yet the poet recognizes “it is I who must bring the world to the fire.” Now nearing ninety, Knute Skinner for more than six decades has been doing just that to the fire of his imagination—vitally, consistently, indelibly.” Daniel Tobin Knute Skinner was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1929, but he has had a home in Ireland since 1963. Salmon Poetry has published nine previous books: eight poetry collections and a memoir.
SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781912561148 PB | 80PP | 5 NOVEMBER 2018
THE NARROW WAY OF SOULS Eileen Sheehan •
“These are poems that enact loss and console simultaneously... an imaginative fusing of difference and empathy.” Frances Devlin Glass
In Eileen Sheehan’s third collection, The Narrow Way of Souls, there is an ongoing investigation of the liminal spaces between speech and silence; between body and spirit; between question and answer. These are poems that move through both negative and positive spaces – crossing, crossing over, and journeying; the reader is carried between the real and the surreal. Springing from conscious experience, from history and folklore, from the process of grieving and the experience of grief, these visionary poems light our mad dash along the road between life and death, and further yet. Eileen Sheehan is from Scartaglen, in the Sliabh Luachra area of County Kerry. She lives in Killarney. She is the author of two previous collections, Song of the Midnight Fox and Down the Sunlit Hall (both from Doghouse Books).
SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781912561162 PB | 74PP | 5 NOVEMBER 2018
24
•
A new collection of poetry from the author of Kindland (IBSN: 9781907056673).
The poems in Songs from the Blue River seek to give voice to the land and its inhabitants, both human and non-human. Mountains, rivers, lakes, glaciers, starlings, earthworms, oak trees: all have their say, as do the humans who live with and through them. The struggle to be human in a world which is alive with myth, magic and strange, wild energies is the thread running through this collection. Many of its poems were written in the wilds of Patagonia, and their rhythms are influenced by the song of that wild landscape and its inhabitants. Paul Kingsnorth is a novelist, poet and essayist. He is the author of two novels and three books of non-fiction. His debut collection, Kidland and other poems, was published by Salmon in 2011.
SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781912561100 PB | 54PP | 5 NOVEMBER 2018
COVER COMING SOON
THE TRIUMPH OF CANCER Chris McCabe • • •
New from the author of, most recently, Speculatrix (ISBN: 9781908058256). “Chris McCabe is a poet who takes risks.” The London Magazine “His poetry is raw, energetic and experimental.” The Times
A brave, unexpected book of lyric poems that morph and grow on every reading. Chris McCabe was born in Liverpool in 1977. His most recent poetry collection is Speculatrix (Penned in the Margins, 2014), which followed three previous books The Hutton Inquiry, Zeppelins and THE RESTRUCTURE. In 2014 he was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. His creative non-fiction book In the Catacombs: A Summer Among the Dead Poets of West Norwood Cemetery was published in 2014. His work has been described by The Guardian as ‘an impressively inventive survey of English in the early 21st century.’ He works as the Poetry Librarian at the Poetry Library and teaches for the Poetry School.
PENNED IN THE MARGINS | £9.99 | 9781908058607 PB | 100PP | 6 NOVEMBER 2018
NEAR FUTURE Suzannah Evans • • •
Debut collection by Sheffield-based poet who works for The Poetry Business A 2015 Aldeburgh Eight poet and former Hawthorden fellow. “In an anxious, paranoid world, we need poems like these more than ever. Near Future is a witty and inventive debut collection, offering wry hope as well as a dystopian vision of the future. Suzannah Evans’ writing is subtle and precise, shaped by a searching intellect.” Helen Mort
Doom-pop-poetry with an apocalyptic edge, Suzannah Evans’ debut poetry collection is a witty, dark and sharp-witted journey through sci-fi lullabies and northern mysteries. Suzannah Evans lives in Sheffield and her pamphlet Confusion Species was a winner in the 2012 Poetry Business book and pamphlet competition, judged by Carol Ann Duffy. As a teenager she had an obsessive fear of the apocalypse which has informed and inspired many of her poems, and she still doesn’t know whether it’s best to plan responsibly for the future or party like it’s 1999.
NINE ARCHES PRESS | £9.99 | 9781911027461 PB | 80PP | 7 NOVEMBER 2018
25
POETRY
SONGS FROM THE BLUE RIVER Paul Kingsnorth
SECOND PLACE ROSETTE Richard O’Brien & Emma Wright (ed.) •
Poets from different cultural backgrounds write about what Britain means through their own daily lived experience.
Second Place Rosette is a calendar of the customs, rituals and practices that make up life in modern Britain. The poems take in maypole dancing, mehndi painting, and medical prescriptions. Some events, like the Jewish Sabbath, happen every week; some, like the putting away of Christmas decorations, thankfully come only once a year. The subjects range from the universal to the personal: every family might have its own ritual, and each culture its own important figures to remember and commemorate. In the introduction, co-editor Emma Wright notes how, as the daughter of a refugee, she felt ‘deeply disturbed by current discourse about Britishness and how it seems impossible to separate talk of national identity and pride from talk of exclusion and isolation.’ Against that divisive rhetoric, Wright and co-editor Richard O’Brien have assembled a refreshingly inclusive take on national identity.
THE EMMA PRESS | £10.00 | 9781910139554 PB | 8 NOVEMBER 2018
ODD SOCKS John Robert Brown •
A humourous collection of poetry dotted with charming illustrations.
These intelligent witty poems are likely to disarm the reader with their gentle humour. John Robert Brown fixes his poetic eye on many aspects of modern life which may pass other writers by. One poem is written upside down, elsewhere he finds himself moved to write in praise of the humble saucer, others are inspired by his obvious love of music
IRON PRESS | £8.00 | 9780995457942 PB | 88PP | 10 NOVEMBER 2018
COVER COMING SOON
GREEK VERSE FOR OPHELIA & OTHER POEMS Giovanni Quessep •
The selected works of one of Columbia’s foremost poets.
A Greek Verse for Ophelia and Other Poems contains one hundred poems taken from Giovanni Quessep’s entire oeuvre, including his last published book of poetry, Abyss Unveiled (Abismo revelado). The poems contained have been carefully selected by his translator and the poet himself to launch the introduction of both the magnificent and exuberant world of his art, to English-speaking readers of poetry. This collection is designed to provide its reader with an insight into the wealth and complexity of Colombia’s culture, a country whose history of violence and political corruption has often been over-simplified by the international media, including film and television industries. In the work of one of its finest artists, the English-speaking public will have the opportunity to observe the fine threads that make up Colombian reality through the prism of marvel and incantation evoked by Quessep’s poetry.
OUT-SPOKEN PRESS | £10.00 | 9781999679217 PB | 12 NOVEMBER 2018
26
• •
“A fantastic poet with a great mix of dry humour and real-life heart and emotion.” Harry Baker ”Melanie Branton is an unexpected poetry slap. The kind that makes your face tingle and your eyebrows sky rocket. She is funny, clever, ironic, dry, gripping, needed and you won’t see her coming until she is standing in your face.” Liv Torc
Spangles and Space Dust. Overboiled cabbage. Clotted cream. Placki ziemniaczane. Can You See Where I’m Coming From? examines the ingredients that have made Melanie Branton who she is, from a 1970s working-class childhood to a Dickensian boarding school, from bogus Cornishness to a stint teaching in Poland. Melanie Branton was born in 1968 in Exeter and has worked as a teacher of English and Drama, an assistant theatre director and a full-time carer. She began writing poetry in her forties and took up spoken word in 2014 at the age of 46.
BURNING EYE BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781911570561 PB | 15 NOVEMBER 2018
YES YES MOUTH Adham Smart •
“One of the best young poets around at the moment.” Roddy Lumsden
This is a book for people who like to feel a bit sick when they read poems. They are about times when you do things to excess, and times when you avoid doing things entirely. Sometimes political, sometimes sexual, always hungry, these poems are full and overripe, and this book is a meal that is too big for people who hate to throw away their food. Adham Smart is a poet and linguist from London. He was a winner of the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2006, 2008, and 2009, and has had writing in The Cadaverine Anthology (Cadaverine, 2009), Korsakoff’s Paper Chain (Sidekick Books, 2010) and The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011). Adham was a Young Producer for both the Southbank Centre and the Poetry Society National Poetry Day Live 2014.
VALLEY PRESS | £7.99 | 9781912436132 PB | 52PP | 15 NOVEMBER 2018
LIONESS Chérie Taylor Battiste • •
Publicity plan in place: targeting radio and literary festival opportunities, anything that will ensure audiences see/hear this remarkable performer. The issues covered could not be more topical: particularly racism, sexism, and the societal shift in the way both are perceived (as relates to the Windrush anniversary, Trump, #metoo movement).
Debut collection from the acclaimed performance poet. Written after the loss of the author’s adoptive mother, Lioness asks: what does ‘Motherhood’ mean to someone who was taken from their mother? What does ‘Blackness’ mean to someone removed from it? How do you build an authentic identity in an inauthentic world? Chérie Taylor-Battiste was born in London in 1976. Finding herself a lone parent to two, as austerity hit, she returned to poetry, her first means of expression during her challenging childhood. She saw poetry as freedom, a rare means of having an un-edited cultural voice, and a way of sharing her unique set of experiences.
VALLEY PRESS | £9.99 | 9781912436149 PB | 80PP | 22 NOVEMBER 2018
27
POETRY
CAN YOU SEE WHERE I’M COMING FROM? Melanie Branton
COVER COMING SOON
POETRY IRELAND REVIEW ISSUE 126 Eavan Boland (ed.) •
Edited by the internationally-acclaimed poet Eavan Boland, this issue includes new poems from Irish and international poets, as well as reviews, essays and artwork.
Poetry Ireland Review Issue 126 includes Nell Regan’s essay on the poetry of the legendary theatre impresario, Micheál Mac Liammóir (1899-1978), who co-founded Dublin’s Gate Theatre and numbered Orson Welles among his many distinguished collaborators. Lottie Limb re-evaluates Blánaid Salkeld, a woman poet whose work remains unjustly neglected, in an essay that makes a compelling case for Salkeld to be regarded as a leading Irish modernist poet of the last century. Books reviewed include new titles from Ailbhe Darcy, Joseph Woods, Martina Evans, Colm Keegan, and Elaine Feeney. Plus the usual generous helping of new poems from a diverse selection of new voices and old favourites.
POETRY IRELAND | £10.00 | 9781902121741 PB | 128PP | 30 NOVEMBER 2018
Poetry Ireland Review is a highly-regarded journal of poetry. Published three times a year, the Review includes the work of both emerging and established Irish and international poets, essayists, critics and visual artists. Poetry Ireland showcases the best of all aspects of contemporary poetry, and promotes and protects the island’s outstanding poetic heritage.
FOR SUBSCRIPTION OPTIONS PLEASE CONTACT REBECCA@INPRESSBOOKS.CO.UK.
28
DECEMBER KEY TITLE
THE ROAD, SLOWLY Liz Quirke “These poems are full of force and mystery, a moving study of the ways in which we mother and in which we love.” Leanne O’Sullivan The Road, Slowly is the ground-breaking debut collection of love poems from award-winning Irish poet, Liz Quirke. With an assured voice, her poems weave through the experience of becoming a wife and mother in a collection of considerable lyrical beauty. Her poetry ploughs new thematic ground with confidence and subtle, delicate observations. Same-sex parenting in modern Ireland; non-biological motherhood and ways in which the past can inform the present are explored with courage. Quirke celebrates the connection between parents and children within a non-nuclear family with scalpel sharpness and a discerning eye. Her poems pay tribute to the achievement of family.
SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781912561124 PB | 80PP | 3 DECEMBER 2018
29
JUST BECAUSE Neetha Kunaratnam •
Debut collection by prize-winning British-Asian poet.
Neetha Kunaratnam’s debut collection interrogates violence by examining the societal structures that underpin war and the cultural narratives that justify them. Just Because reflects on the slaughter of civilians in far-away places, and acts of unkindness closer to home. It’s a book that investigates the shared masculinity of Popeye, Spartacus, paintballers and urban teenagers. But Kunaratnam also celebrates fatherhood, and delights in finding the miraculous hidden in the everyday, inexplicable and unexpected pleasures that bring joy, just because... Neetha Kunaratnam works as a teacher in Kent. He was born and grew up in London of Tamil Sri Lankan parents. His poetry has been published in many magazines and in Carol Ann Duffy (ed) Off the Shelf. He won the Poetry Society’s Geoffrey Dearmer Prize in 2007. He lives in East Sussex with his wife and daughters.
SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £7.99 | 9781999827694 PB | 84PP | 1 DECEMBER 2018
LINE DRAWING Ross Wilson •
Poetry about modern masculinity, violence and love.
Ross Wilson’s long-awaited first full collection explores the fault lines between highbrow and lowbrow, highlands and lowlands, high and low culture. Drawing on his experiences as a low paid nurse and as a schoolboy boxing champion, Wilson takes a line for a walk between production lines, life lines, railway-lines, dirt lines, touch lines, sword-lines and the wafer-thin line between civilisation and barbarism. Line Drawing is a tough-minded book with a tender-heart, moving from violence towards the possibilities of love and compassion. Ross Wilson was raised in Kelty, a former mining village in West Fife. His first pamphlet collection, The Heavy Bag, was published by Calder Wood Press in 2011. He lives in North Lanarkshire with his partner and daughter, and works full time as an Auxiliary Nurse in Glasgow. His poems have been featured in publications such as The Edinburgh Review, Poetry Salzburg Review and The Honest Ulsterman among others.
SMOKESTACK BOOKS | £7.99 | 9781999674205 PB | 84PP | 1 DECEMBER 2018
WHISPER OF A CROW’S WING Majella Cullinane •
”Cullinane’s poetry style carries its own grandeur like the landscapes she describes.” Emma Shi
Majella Cullinane’s remarkable second collection, Whisper of a Crow’s Wing, is the work of a poet with a distinct and powerful voice. These poems weigh and examine oppositions – the distance of time and place, the balance of life and death, the poet’s New Zealand home and her Irish heritage. She writes with lyrical intensity about motherhood and family life, including the experience of miscarriage, and the process of moving through grief and loss to a place of acceptance and healing. This is a profound collection from a poet alive to the hidden world of memory and imagination, of the sublime in the everyday, tempered always by a shadow of the fragility of life and love. Originally from Ireland, Majella Cullinane has lived in New Zealand since 2008. She published her first poetry collection, Guarding The Flame, with Salmon Poetry in 2011.
SALMON POETRY | £10.00 | 9781912561360 PB | 1 DECEMBER 2018
30
OCTOBER KEY TITLE
PRAISE SONG FOR THE BUTTERFLIES Bernice L. McFadden Abebe Tsikata lives a comfortable, happy life in West Africa as the privileged nine- year-old daughter of a government employee and stay-at-home mother. But when the Tsikatas’ idyllic lifestyle takes a turn for the worse, Abebe’s father, following his mother’s advice, places her in a religious shrine, hoping that the sacrifice of his daughter will serve as religious atonement for the crimes of his ancestors. Unspeakable acts befall Abebe for the fifteen years she is enslaved within the shrine. When she is finally rescued, broken and battered, she must struggle to overcome her past, endure the revelation of family secrets, and learn to trust and love again. In the tradition of Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand, Praise Song for the Butterflies is a contemporary story that offers an educational, eye-opening account of the practice of ritual servitude in West Africa. Spanning decades and two continents, Praise Song for the Butterflies will break and heal your heart.
JACARANDA BOOKS | £18.99 | 9781909762886 HB | 264PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
31
NEVERLAND Jonathan Green
COVER COMING SOON
•
New from the author of Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland (9781909679597) and The Wicked Wizard of Oz (9781911390312).
The next great adventure book from bestselling gaming author Jonathan Green, author of Alice’s Nightmare in Wonderland. Jonathan Green is a writer of speculative fiction, with more than sixty books to his name. Well known for his contributions to the Fighting Fantasy range of adventure gamebooks, he has also written fiction for such diverse properties as Doctor Who, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, Sonic the Hedgehog, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Moshi Monsters, LEGO and Judge Dredd. He is the creator of the Pax Britannia series and has written eight novels set within this steampunk universe. He is also the author of an increasing number of non-fiction titles, including the award-winning YOU ARE THE HERO – A History of Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks.
SNOWBOOKS | £8.99 | 9781911390411 PB | 520PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
RESISTANCE Julián Fuks (translated by Daniel Hahn) •
A novel by an award-winning Brazilian writer.
Resistance is a profound and moving novel about family and society in Latin America. In the terrifying atmosphere of late 1970s Buenos Aires, a young militant couple engaged in the resistance against the military regime adopt a child. Matters had reached a nadir; people were informing on friends and family members, who were then captured by the regime and subjected to horrific torture. Amid this ever-growing oppression, the couple and their baby flee to Brazil, believing it to be a more tranquil country in which to raise a family and pursue their lives. Julián Fuks was born in São Paulo in 1981 and is the son of Argentinian parents. He has worked as a reporter for the newspaper Folha de S. Paulo and as a reviewer for the magazine Cult. His novel Procura do romance (2011) was shortlisted for the São Paulo Prize for Literature and longlisted for the Telecom Award.
CHARCO PRESS | £12.99 | 9781999859329 PB | 150PP | 4 OCTOBER 2018
I’LL GO ON Hwang Jungeun (translated by Emily Yae Won) • •
From one South Korea’s brightest young authors, a tender story about family and growth. New from the author of One Hundred Shadows (ISBN: 9781911284024).
From one of South Korea’s most acclaimed young authors comes the story of two sisters, Sora and Nana, whose childhood was marked by their father’s death in a factory accident and their mother Aeja’s retreat into suicidal catatonia. A delicate stylist with an unflinching social gaze, in I’ll Go On Hwang Jungeun has crafted a poignant novel with an uncanny ear for the unspoken secrets and heartaches buried beneath daily life and family ritual. It is a stunning exploration of the intensity of early bonds – and the traces they leave on us as we grow up. Hwang Jungeun is one of the bright young things of Korean literature, having published two collections of short stories and three novels to date.
TILTED AXIS PRESS | £8.99 | 9781911284208 PB | 4 OCTOBER 2018
32
•
From the author of Trieste (9781780878355) and Belladonna (9780857054319).
Doppelgänger consists of two stories that skillfully revisit the question of “doubles” (famously explored by Stevenson, Dostoyevsky and others), and how an individual is perpetually caught between their own beliefs and those imposed on them by society. ‘Arthur and Isabella’ is a story of the relationship between two elderly people who meet on New Year’s Eve - a romantic encounter which turns into a grotesque portrayal of the loneliness of old age. The second story ‘Pupi’ - a strange mirror of the first - centres on the life of a man who ends up on the streets and associates only with street-sellers the rhinoceroses in the zoo. Together these tales crate the highly original atmosphere that Drndić is famous for in all her works. Daša Drndić was a distinguished Croatian novelist, playwright and literary critic, author of radio plays and documentaries. She is the author of thirteen novels, all published in the UK by Macelhose Press.
ISTROS BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781912545131 PB | 126PP | 15 OCTOBER 2018
CUT GUAVAS Robert Antoni •
Fan-fiction homage to the Planet of the Apes franchise that connects with a story of 1940s colonial Trinidad.
Evading the wrath of company lawyers zealously protecting their franchise, Robert Antoni’s novel, written partially in film-script form, pays fan-fiction homage to that famous simian brand, whilst at the same time deconstructing the saga for what it has to say about race in the film and in American society. Austin Stoker – a character based on a real-life Trinidadian actor in Hollywood – is shooting the sequel to Assault of the Civilization of the Simians in his old age, the Hollywood film that launched his moderately successful acting career. But Stoker, drinking back-home Trinidadian remedies but not taking his prescribed dementia medicine, finds separating reality from fiction to be an increasingly difficult task. Robert Antoni’s other books are Blessed is the Fruit (Faber), My Grandmother’s Erotic Folktales (Faber), Carnival (Faber), which was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize 2006, and As Flies to Whatless Boys (Peepal Tree Press).
PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £9.99 | 9781845234294 PB | 160PP | 25 OCTOBER 2018
A BOOK OF SECRETS Kate Morrison •
An exciting new historical fiction writer for fans of Philippa Gregory, Alison Weir and Joanna Courtney.
A Book of Secrets is the story of a woman named Susan Charlewood living in Elizabethan England. Born in what is now Ghana, Susan is enslaved by the Portuguese but later rescued by British sailors, who bring her to England. When Susan comes of age, she marries an older Catholic man, John Charlewood. Charlewood runs a printing press and uses it to supply the Papist nobility with illegal Catholic texts and foment rebellion amongst the Catholic underclass. When Charlewood dies, Susan takes over the business and uses her new position to find out more about her origins. A look at racial relationships on the eve of the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade, A Book of Secrets is a revealing and compelling glimpse into a fraught time. Kate Morrison is a British debut novelist. A Book of Secrets was longlisted for the Mslexia Unpublished Novel Award in 2015.
JACARANDA BOOKS | £16.99 | 9781909762695 PB | 324PP | 31 OCTOBER 2018
33
FICTION
DOPPELGÄNGER Daša Drndić
NOVEMBER KEY TITLE
DOGS AND OTHERS Biljana Jovanović The protagonist in Dogs and Others is the first openly lesbian character in modern Serbian literature, but she is also so much more than that, as she encapsulates the zeitgeist of her generation. Coming of age in 1970s Belgrade, then the capital city of thriving, socialist Yugoslavia, we follow Lida and the bohemian life she leads, made more complicated by the trials and tribulations of her eccentric family. The whole novel breathes with a raw sensibility so aptly captured in the voice of the heroine — a striking, rebellious, overtly feminist and somewhat neurotic young woman. Praise for Biljana Jovanović: “Biljana Jovanović came into the Serbian literary scene as a new phenomenon . . . Such girls in literature bring with them spite, devastating erotica, a new language, and new rules, especially when the old rules break down painfully…” Svetlana Slapšak, author and professor “…a rich amalgam of unvarnished bohemian life in socialist Belgrade, narrative experimentation, a sensitive but provocative depiction of family life in the shadow of old age, disability, and ‘madness’… ” WORDS without BORDERS
ISTROS BOOKS | £9.99 | 9781912545162 PB | 146PP | 5 NOVEMBER 2018
34
• •
“Dave McGowan is a trenchant observer of everyday life. These pieces are moving, insightful, hilarious and tragic by turn.” Julia Bell “Let Dave McGowan be your guide to a hidden seam of city life. He is part flaneur, part fly-on-the-wall, but be warned: once you’ve tuned in to the chatter you may not be able to turn it off.” Tony White
Earwigging is a journey, never lingering for too long in any one place. It is the written equivalent of walking through a train station or waiting for a friend in a pub, conversations drifting in and out of earshot, only ever in part and neither beginning nor resolved. It is the overheard world. It is poignant, it is as unreal as only reality can be. It is hilarious. Dave McGowan is a London writer, one half of the In Yer Ear spoken word and live music night in the London literary circuit. As a part of this, he is in the process of producing their first anthology in collaboration with Wicked Hag in Berlin.
WRECKING BALL PRESS | £14.00 | 9781903110393 HB | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
UEA CREATIVE WRITING ANTHOLOGY PROSE FICTION 2018 Various Authors •
One of the prestigeous UEA Creative Writing MA’s yearly anthologies.
Every year the UK’s longest-running Creative Writing MA Prose Fiction programme draws together an eclectic mix of writers from across the globe. They tread in the footsteps of some well-established names, most notably the recipient of last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, Kazuo Ishiguro, as well as Booker Prize for Fiction winners Ian McEwan and Anne Enright, but also more recent successful graduates: Naomi Alderman, Ayobami Adebayo, and Emma Healey. This year’s anthology showcases the enormous talent of the cohort and gives a tantalising glimpse into the early work of writers that are sure to become household names in the future.
UEA PUBLISHING PROJECT | £9.99 | 9781911343400 PB | 176PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
UEA CREATIVE WRITING ANTHOLOGY SCRIPTWRITING 2018 Various Authors •
One of the prestigeous UEA Creative Writing MA’s yearly anthologies.
This anthology comprises thirteen original pieces from the latest cohort of students on the UEA MA Scriptwriting course, showcasing some of the creative writing programme’s finest storytelling.
UEA PUBLISHING PROJECT | £9.99 | 9781911343431 PB | 112PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
35
FICTION
EARWIGGING Dave McGowan
HIGH SPIRITS: A ROUND OF DRINKING STORIES Jonathan Taylor & Karen Stevens (ed.) •
A collection of new short stories from contemporary writers on the pains, pleasures and horrors of drinking.
Drinking stories are told by drunks, or about drunks; they are told in pubs, or set in pubs. They are stories where people drink, and stories which somehow induce a sense of drunkenness in readers and listeners. F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed that a good short story could “be written on a bottle.” Here is a collection of contemporary short stories written on and about bottles – stories about the comedies, tragedies, pleasures, pains and horrors of alcohol. Edited with an introduction by Karen Stevens and Jonathan Taylor, contributors include some of the best short story writers in the UK today: Judith Allnatt, Jenn Ashworth, Laurie Cusack, Desmond Barry, Louis de Bernières, Alison Moore, Kate North, Bethan Roberts, Michael Stewart, Melanie Whipman, and Sue Wilsea.
VALLEY PRESS | £10.99 | 9781912436125 PB | 256PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
POSTMORTEM 2018: UEA CREATIVE WRITING ANTHOLOGY CRIME FICTION Various Authors (Foreword by Ian Rankin) •
One of the prestigeous UEA Creative Writing MA’s yearly anthologies.
“Crime fiction in the UK has come a long way from the country-house drawing-room or the confines of 221B Baker Street, and there is ceasing to be the critical snobbery that built seemingly impermeable walls between the crime novel and the literary novel. It was once said that Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in heels. In similar fashion, crime does everything the literary novel does, but without longueurs and a corrosive sense of entitlement. By the time I had finished my stint as Visiting Professor at UEA I had probably learned more from the extraordinarily capable students than they had from me. It is a distinct pleasure to be able to share a flavour of their work with readers. Make no mistake, these are the stars of the future – and you’re reading them here first.” Ian Rankin
UEA PUBLISHING PROJECT | £9.99 | 9781911343417 PB | 160PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
J SS BACH Martin Goodman •
New from the author of On Bended Knees, which was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award.
J SS Bach is the story of three generations of women from either side of Germany’s 20th Century horror story - one side, a Jewish family from Vienna, the other linked to a ranking Nazi official at Dachau concentration camp - who suffer the consequences of what men do. Fast forward to 1990s California, and two survivors from the families meet. Rosa is a young Australian musicologist; Otto is a world-famous composer and cellist. Music and history link them. A novel of music, the Holocaust, love, and a dog. Martin Goodman has written ten books, both fiction and nonfiction, and a theme common to much of his fiction is the exploration of war guilt. He is Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull, Director of the Philip Larkin Centre for Poetry and Creative Writing, and is the founder and publisher of Barbican Press.
WRECKING BALL PRESS | £14.00 | 9781903110621 HB | 5 NOVEMBER 2018
36
•
From influential Somali-Italian writer, the epic and troubled story of a woman in search of herself in a long journey from Somalia to Rome, between past and present.
Adua, who ran away from her strict father and the communist dictatorship, finds herself in Rome, dreaming of making it in the movie industry. Unfortunately, the only movie she will star in, a soft porn called Somali Female, will only bring her humiliation and shame. Igiaba Scego is a Somali Italian novelist and journalist. She writes on several national newspapers such as la Repubblica. She was born in Rome to Somali parents who had emigrated to Italy following Siad Barre’s 1969 coup d’état. Scego’s father had been a wellknown politician in Somalia. In 2010, Scego published a narrative memoir, La mia casa è dove sono (Rizzoli), which was awarded Premio Mondello.
JACARANDA BOOKS | £8.99 | 9781909762923 PB | 190PP | 5 NOVEMBER 2018
THE GERMAN ROOM Carla Maliandi •
Winner of the Bartolomé Hidalgo prize 2017.
Could we claim that The German Room invents a new genre? It would be an exaggeration, of course, but we can certainly say that this novel represents what we could call a non-coming of age tale. A female protagonist, a young woman, travels from Argentina to Germany trapped by emotional conflicts. When she arrives, she is constantly exposed to all kinds of adventures and incidents, some funny, others tragic. She never fully understands her situation. Instead of learning from her circumstances and moving on, she gropes around, perplexed by the reality around her, hesitating as to what to do next. It is this hesitation that turns into thrilling suspense, a book that we can’t put down. We want to know what happens next, and after that. Maliandi takes us by the hand until the end of a novel that becomes, quite simply, remarkable and unforgettable. Carla Maliandi is an award-winning Venezuelan playwright, theatre director, university lecturer and writer.
CHARCO PRESS | £9.99 | 9781999859336 PB | 150PP | 5 NOVEMBER 2018
AN OUTBREAK OF PEACE: STORIES AND POEMS IN RESPONSE TO THE END OF WWI Cherry Potts (ed.) •
Stories inspired by the end of the First World War.
November 2018 marks the centenary of the end of WWI. After all the commemorative works of art over the past four years, we felt it was important to reflect on what comes after - an outbreak of peace, and what that means to the combatants and those left at home. This wide ranging collection brings together stories and poems from many countries, on both sides of the 1914-18 conflict, find their inspiration in many wars and their endings. With contributions by Joan Taylor-Rowan, Katy Darby, Cassandra Passarelli, Sarah James & Helen Morris.
ARACHNE PRESS | £9.99 | 9781909208667 PB | 112PP | 8 NOVEMBER 2018
37
FICTION
COVER COMING SOON
ADUA Igiaba Scego
THE PEEPAL TREE BOOK OF CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN SHORT STORIES
Jacob Ross & Jeremy Poynting (ed.) •
This anthology is unrivalled in its range across the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas, and representative of Caribbean ethnicities, gender and sexual orientations.
Since its beginnings 33 years ago, Peepal Tree has published around 45 collections of Caribbean short stories. This anthology draws from those collections, plus a few guests, focusing on work written over the past twenty-five years, the majority dealing with the recent post-independence period up to the present. The collection includes the work of, amongst others, Opal Palmer Adisa, Christine Barrow, Rhoda Bharath, Jacqueline Bishop, Hazel Campbell, Merle Collins, Cyril Dabydeen, Kwame Dawes, Curdella Forbes, Ifeona Fulani, Keith Jardim, Barbara Jenkins, Meiling Jin, Cherie Jones, Helen Klonaris, Sharon Leach, Jan Shinebourne, Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw and N.D. Williams.
PEEPAL TREE PRESS | £19.99 | 9781845234102 PB | 300PP | 8 NOVEMBER 2018
WINSTON AND ME Mark Woodburn • •
The story of a teenage soldier serving at Winston Churchill’s side, in the trenches of WW1 Flanders and beyond. A sequel is available, The Finest Years and Me (see below), which continues this story into World War Two.
Lying about his age to join the army, Edinburgh teenager Jamie Melville comes to the attention of his battalion’s new colonel, Winston Churchill, who is seeking redemption in the trenches as an ordinary soldier after his resignation over the Dardanelles fiasco in 1915. Jamie becomes the colonel’s new ‘batman’ (a.k.a. orderly) and is soon thrust into the line of fire. After the conflict, Churchill returns to the cabinet, and Jamie’s service continues as assistant to Winston’s private secretary. He will soon learn how to do battle on a very different front, and meet some of the extraordinary characters who inhabit post-war London – as well as making contact with his own broken family, and fighting for a life he can call his own.
VALLEY PRESS | £9.99 | 9781912436156 PB | 320PP | 8 NOVEMBER 2018
THE FINEST YEARS AND ME Mark Woodburn •
Winston Churchill and his former orderly, Jamie Melville, are reunited in 1942, with no less than the fate of the world at stake...
It is 1942, and the war is not going well for Britain. Winston Churchill faces enemies across the world, inside his own parliament, and within his very body and soul. His former ‘batman’ Jamie Melville, having left London in 1919 to build a life of his own, has been struck with a bitter tragedy. It takes an unexpected proposal from the Minister of Information to return Jamie to London, to stand beside his old colonel at his time of greatest need. From the murky underground corridors of Whitehall to Washington D.C. and the Oval Office itself, Jamie is at the centre of high-end decision making, intrigue, treachery and betrayal. It was redemption that originally brought this odd couple together. Now, twenty-five years later, Jamie Melville may unwittingly hold the key that will help to win the Allies victory – and deliver Winston, and Britain, to their finest hour.
VALLEY PRESS | £8.99 | 9781908853561 PB | 320PP | 19 NOVEMBER 2015
38
KEY TITLE
JUST HELP YOURSELF Vernon Hopkins Just Help Yourself is the classic story of the difficult path to fame trod by so many bands and artists in the 1960s. It tells the story of Rhydyfelin rock group The Senators (later the Squires), of founder Vernon Hopkins’s discovery of Tom Jones, and their launch towards international stardom. This is the band’s story from their gigging days in south Wales when Tom and Vernon were as close as brothers, to their eventual and inevitable painful falling out in 1969 when Vernon was sacked by manager (and fellow south Walian) Gordon Mills: since then Hopkins has seen Tom on only a handful of occasions. This is a no-holds-barred account of their time together, gigging in Working Men’s Clubs in south Wales, living a less-thanglamorous life in Notting Hill, waiting for their breakthrough in London. When fame finally did arrive, with it came the uncoupling of the star singer from the band by an unscrupulous manager. Just Help Yourself gives new insight into Tom Jones himself, and into the world of pop music in the late Sixties and early Seventies in a grittily authentic narrative. Hopkins experienced both the pop star high life, touring America, Australia and Europe, and the low points of being a jobbing musician. The music business really was – and is – as cut throat as reported.
SEREN | £9.99 | 9781781724767 PB | 272PP | 15 OCTOBER 2018
39
DEAR MONA Jonah Jones
COVER COMING SOON
• •
Rare first-hand description of life as a conscientious objector, as written at the time. Full of detail about life on the home front during WW2.
Dear Mona, Letters from a Conscientious Objector are the words of 20 year old working class Geordie Len Jones to his mentor and would-be partner Mona Lovell. Their correspondence begin when Len, as a conscientious objector, was forced to work in forestry during the war. Eventually he decided on a more active role in the fight against fascism and became a non-arms bearing medic. He was parachuted into northern Europe and took part in the Ardennes and German campaigns, and in the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. In Dear Mona Jones records in his own words the story of the Home Front and of the European campaign following D Day. It is a remarkable, immediate account: personal, intimate and yet also history, played out before his eyes.
SEREN | £19.99 | 9781781724798 HB | 420PP | 8 OCTOBER 2018
LOW COUNTRY: BREXIT ON THE ESSEX COAST Tom Bolton •
A non-fiction, psychogeographic book walking the Essex coast before, during and after the 2016 EU Referendum.
Celebrated walker and essayist Tom Bolton walks the boggy, winding coastline of Essex, encountering stunning landscapes, wind-battered towns and front-garden Union Jacks. Spanning both landscape and political writing, Low Country interrogates the natural and social environments of Essex, asking why its particular politics is so pronounced, and what we can learn from the county’s role in shaping the nation. Tom Bolton is an author and essayist based in London. He has written several books, has lectured for Royal Geographical Society and Science Museum Lates, appeared across BBC Radio and written articles for the Guardian and Daily Telegraph.
PENNED IN THE MARGINS | £12.99 | 9781908058591 PB | 250PP | 15 OCTOBER 2018
UEA CREATIVE WRITING ANTHOLOGY NON-FICTION 2018 Various Authors •
One of the prestigeous UEA Creative Writing MA’s yearly anthologies.
“Our non-fiction writers this year have spread their wings to take on an extraordinary range of subjects, places and, indeed, genres…” Kathryn Hughes Non-fiction writing constantly finds itself being redefined. It can mean almost anything, but always involves facts and truth as writers break rules and experiment with content and form. From memoir to journalism, to stories that combine history with lived experience, this anthology of creative non-fiction assembles voices from six different countries, telling true stories from Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and North America.
UEA PUBLISHING PROJECT | £9.99 | 9781911343448 PB | 96PP | 1 NOVEMBER 2018
40
THE CLYDACH MURDERS John Morris
TALKING TO WOMEN Nell Dunn
KNOW YOUR PLACE Various Authors
John Morris’s book is an investigation into the Clydach murders in South Wales in 1999 in which Mandy Power, her mother and two daughters were battered to death.
In 1964, Nell Dunn spoke In 21st century Britain, what to nine of her friends over does it mean to be working a bottle of wine about men, class? This book asks 24 worksex, work, money, babies, ing class writers to examine freedom and love. Novelist the issue as it relates to them. Edna O’Brien remembers being ‘very frightened’ of having Examining representation, Morris contends that, although her nipples touched. The Pop literature, sexuality, gender, art, tried twice, Dai Morris, the Artist Pauline Boty says she employment, poverty, childman convicted for the murders got married to the ‘first man I hood, culture and politics, this in 2006, is innocent. No could talk very freely to’. Kathy book is a broad and first hand forensic evidence or DNA Collier, who Dunn worked with account of what it means to connected him to the crime; in a Battersea sweet factory, be drawn from the bottom of his conviction was based on confesses that she had thought Britain’s archaic, but persistent, the lack of a solid alibi, the about suicide. class structure. presence of his gold chain in Power’s house and the lies After more than forty years Includes contributions from he initially told the police in out of print, Talking to Women is Andrew McMillan, Kit explanation. still as sparkling, honest, DeWaal and Yvonne Singh. profound, funny and wise as His case is currently being when it was first published. “This book is a game changer.” reviewed and will be heard in With a new afterword by Nell Nikes Shukla the Court of Appeal, probably Dunn and an ntroduction by in 2018, in the light of new Ali Smith. “A revelatory self-portrait of evidence, including DNA the working class.” The New testing and falsification of ISBN: 9780995716216 Statesman police documents. South Price: £10.99 Wales Police was notorious in Publisher: Silver Press “Know Your Place is a book the period 1980 to 2010 for that is a political howl from false convictions on fabricated those who know that it is evidence and the Morris case easier, that we are easier, to appears to be another instance go unacknowledged.” Dr Lisa of this. Mckenzie, LSE Review of Books ISBN: 9781781723920 Price: £9.99 Publisher: Seren
ISBN: 9781911585374 Price: £9.99 Publisher: Dead Ink Books
NON-FICTION
NON-FICTION BACKLIST
I WAS BRITPOPPED Jenny Natasha & Tom BonifaceWebb Britpop: it’s the only term that can accurately encompass the bright, bold sound and attitude that burst from the United Kingdom in the ’90s. Beginning with the release of Blur’s single ‘Popscene’ in 1992, peaking with Oasis’ triumphant outdoor live shows at Knebworth in 1996 and closing with Pulp’s come-down album This is Hardcore in 1998, this alternative rock subgenre grew to be one of Britain’s most impactful musical movements of the modern era. Here, in more than 500 light-hearted but meticulously researched entries, musicians and fans Jenny Natasha and Tom Boniface-Webb pay tribute to a brief but pivotal moment in musical history; turning the spotlight on key players like Liam Gallagher, Brett Anderson, Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn as well as unsung heroes who fought under the red, white and blue banner in the Britpop revolution. ISBN: 9781908853929 Price: £15.99 Publisher: Valley Press
41
KEY TITLE
PRIDEAUX ANGELS Kimberley Campanello A children’s Christmas classic in the making, set in beautiful Cornwall. Not so very long ago in Great Britain, little children had to pack up a few of their most important belongings and leave their towns and cities to go to the countryside. These children were leaving their homes to be kept safe from the dangers of war. They were called evacuees. Some of the children were brought to a beautiful place called Cornwall, which juts out into the Atlantic Ocean like an open arm. One day, the evacuees in Cornwall were invited to a big Christmas party at a grand old house named Prideaux Place. Once there, they discovered a house full of extraordinary characters, from Gertie the Land Girl to the devoted Lord Edmund and the anxious Lady Bridget – as well as a robin with an astonishing story to tell… This entertaining and moving book is a festive parcel of delights!
VALLEY PRESS | £10.99 | 9781912436040 PB | 48PP | 25 OCTOBER 2018
42
This is a modern fairy tale about a princess with a difference. Princess Lucy is the most beautiful girl in the world but she isn’t interested in finding her prince charming. She prefers to dabble in magic and witchcraft with her beloved friend, a witch called Willow. Together they come up with a cunning plan so that all her suitors, the Kings and Princes who come from far and wide, will be prevented from marrying her. Warning: Don’t touch her necklace!
PUDDING PRESS | £7.99 | 9780995538634 PB | 48PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
ONCE UPON A TIME IN BIRMINGHAM Louise Palfreyman (ed.) Who was the world’s first female programmer? Who made history as the first British woman to sail solo around the world non-stop? Who is Birmingham’s first female Muslim MP? Meet Mary Lee Berners-Lee, Lisa Clayton, Shabana Mahmood and many more in Once Upon a Time in Birmingham, a lively introduction to thirty of Birmingham’s most awe-inspiring women, past and present. From pioneers in their field to everyday heroines, these are women who refused to be silenced, who fought for what they believed in, who proved they were just as good as men… if not better! THE EMMA PRESS | £14.99 | 9781910139516 PB | 112PP | 1 OCTOBER 2018
THE HEAD THAT WEARS A CROWN Rachel Piercey & Emma Wright (ed.) Which King trained his pet monkey to give rude gestures? Which ruthless Queen enjoyed toasting people to a crisp? Whose reign lasted only nine days? The Head That Wears A Crown is a captivating collection that features the Kings and Queens of the British Isles as you’ve never seen them before. Read Queen Victoria’s Twitter posts and young Elizabeth I’s letters to her father’s latest wife. Hear the muddy marching song of King Harold’s soldiers and learn which royal was Danish as a pastry, but nothing like as sweet! Intriguing, comical and accompanied by fascinating historical facts, these vibrant poems are a joy to read, bringing a long line of daring and devious monarchs to life. THE EMMA PRESS | £12.00 | 9781910139769 PB | 4 OCTOBER 2018
43
CHILDREN’S
THE NECKLACE Patricia Borlenghi
BEING ME Peter Kalu Meet Adele Vialli: an intelligent, funny and resourceful 14-year-old – and a born troublemaker. Bored by her privileged life in a leafy suburb, Adele prefers shoplifting and hanging out with her footballer boyfriend, Marcus. Adele is the star of her school’s football team, and when an England scout comes on the lookout for potential new players, her future seems full of promise. But when her City banker dad suddenly starts flirting with the mother of her ‘frenemy’ and fellow footballer Mikaela, a war breaks out between the two girls which threatens to throw everything off course. Teenage rivalry, family troubles – and the beautiful game. HOPEROAD | £7.00 | 9781908446701 PB | 228PP | 31 OCTOBER 2018
THE DOG WHO FOUND SORROW Ruta Briede The Dog Who Found Sorrow is an engrossing, unique picture book, suitable for all ages, and illustrated with beautifully textured artwork of city life, full of clouds and music. The book tackles serious topics such as sadness and difficulties of city life with gentle fantasy storytelling, beautiful artwork, and an uplifting ending. It is written by Ruta Briede, a leading illustrator and instructor at the Latvian Academy of Arts, and illustrated by Elina Braslina.
THE EMMA PRESS | £10.00 | 9781910139547 HB | 40PP | 22 NOVEMBER 2018
ZOMBIE XI Peter Kalu Football-crazy Leonard sits on the substitutes’ bench of the Ducie High School XI, but is never asked to play. Then everything changes. After a game near a nuclear power plant, a weird energy passes through Leonard, and that night he is visited by zombies... The ghostly players from the winning 1966 England World Cup team tell him that if he follows their instructions, not only will he get off the bench – but Ducie High Xl will start to take control. Leonard obeys, and the team’s prospects surge. But what is the price of the zombies’ involvement? Zombie Xl is a story about football, friendship, family and cross-cultural teen relationships. HOPEROAD | £7.00 | 9781908446718 PB | 216PP | 29 NOVEMBER 2018
44
BLAST OFF! Carole Bromley
MOON JUICE Kate Wakeling
LUCKY DIP Catharine Boddy
From riddles, clerihews, and rhyming couplets, to fairytales, Christmas angels, and magnesium...
WINNER OF THE 2017 CLiPPA AWARD FOR THE BEST CHILDREN’S POETRY BOOK.
Dip into this book of children’s poetry and take your pick. Will you find one to make you smile ... or make you think?
CHILDREN’S
CHILDREN’S BACKLIST
THE BUBBLE WRAP Dean Parkin Welcome to The Bubble Wrap, a snappy collection of poems bursting with energy, imagination and charm.
With poems to curl up with, Meet Skig, who’s meant to be a Within this mixed-up selection poems for bedtime, and poems warrior (but is really more of a you’ll find such terrors as a Where else will you find odes just crying out for audience worrier). Meet a giddy comet, dragon under the bed, dinner to everyday magic, three cans participation, Blast Off! is a skidding across the sky with her ladies (yikes!) and a of spagnats, lies about trees, cheeky, curious, and lyrical tail on fire. Put a marvellous cereal-loving dinosaur. You the sea and the moon, and the collection for children. new machine in your pocket might glimpse a fox, if you best thing about a sneeze? and maybe you’ll be able to fix open that page quickly enough, Cathy Benson’s playful all your life’s problems. and you’ll find helpful poems to There’s a Haystack Noodle illustrations bring Blast Off! to read out loud if you ever lose to make you feel brave, the life for younger readers, whilst Kate Wakeling’s first book your passport, or haven’t quite horror of losing your shoes on for slightly older readers, there of poems for children is full got round to brushing your the first day of school, and the are familiar fairytales that pose of curious characters and teeth yet... danger of picking your ball out troubling perspectives, and a strange situations. The poems of a brambly hedge. gentle, yet haunting articulation she writes are always musical, ISBN: 9781908853790 of the adult world: I see them, sometimes magical, and full of Price: £4.99 Discover umpteen alternative hundreds of them in boats / wonder at the weirdness of Publisher Valley Press uses for your smart phone like the one we went fishing the world. (without it leaving your hand) on, / their faces like my kid and many more unlikely brother’s / the day he fell into Moon Juice contains 25 poems celebrations in this exhilarating the pond (‘Six O’Clock News’). and features bonus materials, and inventive debut collection including interviews with the for young people of all ages. Blast off on an exciting journey author and the illustrator, and into space, the past, fairytales ideas for writing your own ISBN: 9781910367902 with a difference, under your poems. Price: £6.95 bed, and, above all, into the Publisher: Smith | Doorstop imagination. ISBN: 9781910139493 Price: £8.50 Ten, nine, eight... Publisher: The Emma Press ISBN: 9781910367766 Price: £6.95 Publisher: Smith | Doorstop
45
THINGS YOU FIND IN A POET’S BEARD A. F. Harrold Things You Find in a Poet’s Beard is a collection of poems that have been shouted at children from schools to church halls. They are a curation of silly tales that have been illustrated and bound into a book. Perhaps you’ll want to annoy your family by reading them out; perhaps you’ll want to chuckle at them under the covers with a torch; perhaps you’ll want to stare at the drawings drawn by Mr Chris Riddell or maybe you’ll want to shout them aloud to capture the spirit of A.F. Harrold himself. ISBN: 9781909136618 | Price:£9.99 | Publisher: Burning Eye Books
THE BIRACIAL BUTTERFLY Lennox Benson This gloriously illustrated children’s book illuminates contemporary mixed race life from the point of view of a child. A much needed volume, The Biracial Butterfly shows the beauty and magic of identity, and celebrates the lives of interracial families today. Our young hero Skyler is a spunky and sensitive soul surfer, voyaging into the depths of his mind. He assembles the pieces of his cultural jigsaw together with musical rhymes and colourful imagery. ISBN: 9781907133558 | Price: £9.99 | Publisher: Dog Horn Publishing
THE BOOK OF CLOUDS Juris Kronbergs If you look up on a cloudy day, you’ll see a whole new surprising world above you - the world of clouds! The Book of Clouds is an introduction to this world - and the guide you’ll want by your side to help you understand it. With 25 poems and many full-page illustrations that use watercolour and collage, you won’t be able to pick The Book of Clouds up without wanting to immediately start making your own cloud diary. So The Book of Clouds comes with 9 pages for your own notes and sketches at the end - let it truly become YOUR book of clouds! ISBN: 9781910139141 | Price: £12.00 | Publisher: The Emma Press
QUEEN OF SEAGULLS Ruta Briete
Do you know your neighbours? But do you really know them? In this delightfully subversive, comic contemporary fable, written for children and adults alike, you will be reminded that everyone you know - even your most boring or annoying neighbour - might be leading a life full of magic and wonder… Renata may not seem like your average hero. She’s an angry neighbour who complains about the people around her, steals food that has been left out for the birds, and yells if she ever hears music. But there is much more to her… what are the seagulls trying to tell her? ISBN: 9781910139134 | Price: £10.00 | Publisher: The Emma Press
46
Ieva Flamingo’s children’s poems capture the emotional highs and lows of childhood with a sharp, surreal eye and a touching sympathy. The Noisy Classroom is a friend of a book: the poems here understand the pressures faced by children, but they also take in stressed parents, overworked teachers who dream of holidays in Iceland, and the fairies who clean the school at the end of the day. Not to mention the headmaster: after all, he was young once too... The Noisy Classroom contains 40 poems and features bonus materials and ideas for writing your own poems. ISBN: 9781910139820 | Price: £8.50 | Publisher: The Emma Press
WATCHER OF THE SKIES Rachel Piercey & Emma Wright (ed.)
How big is the universe? Are there dogs in space? What if your friend – or your granddad – was an alien? Join the poets in wondering in Watcher of the Skies, a sparkling collection of poems about the outermost possibilities of space, life and our imaginations. Fully illustrated by Emma Wright and accompanied with helpful facts from space scientist Rachel Cochrane (Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh) and ideas for writing poems from Rachel Piercey, this is the perfect companion for any budding stargazer or astronaut. ISBN: 9781910139431 | Price: £8.50 | Publisher: The Emma Press
FALLING OUT OF THE SKY Rachel Piercey & Emma Wright (ed.) Falling Out Of The Sky is a treasury of poems which retell classic myths, legends and fairytales from across the world. Hansel and Gretel’s witch takes us behind the scenes of the construction of her gingerbread cottage, and Medusa explains how the snakes on her head rule out a lot of options in everyday life – wearing a hat, for example. Full of alternate viewpoints and spirited new versions of old stories, Falling Out The Sky is a friendly introduction to poetry. These are poems which parents can read aloud to younger children, and which older children can read to themselves, delighting in the mischief and invention of the poets. ISBN: 9781910139189 | Price: £8.50 | Publisher: The Emma Press
EVERYONE’S THE SMARTEST Contra
School can be hard, fun and strange – sometimes all at once. It’s full of your best friends, teachers and lots of kids you’ve never met, and every day reveals more stories and challenges… Everyone’s The Smartest contains 60 poems on all aspects of school life, with playful illustrations on every page. Contra’s poems confront the school day with the matter-of-fact tone of children who know that the world is full of magic. The whole world of Everyone’s The Smartest is teeming with treasure - like a treasury of new Michael Rosen poems illustrated by Judith Kerr. ISBN: 9781910139998 | Price: £12.00 | Publisher: The Emma Press
47
CHILDREN’S
THE NOISY CLASSROOM Ieva Flamingo
NEW FROM...
NEW POETRY
THE NORTH
The North is essential reading if you are a lover of good poetry. Each issue includes: a lively range of international contemporary poetry by new and established writers, book reviews from mainstream publishers to smaller presses; critical articles; conversations with writers; and blind criticism. Issue 61
The North is essential reading if you are a lover of good poetry. Each issue includes: a lively range of international contemporary poetry by new and established writers; book reviews from mainstream publishers to smaller presses; critical articles; conversations with writers; and blind criticism. The North 61 will be an Irish-focused issue, guest edited by Jane Clarke, featuring poems by Irish poets and reviews of Irish books. Price: £10.00 Pub date: 1 December 2018
“EXCELLENT.” THE GUARDIAN “REDRESSING THE BALANCE OF ENGLISH POETRY.” POETRY REVIEW “THE NORTH GROWS IN AUTHORITY WITH EVERY ISSUE.” ANDY CROFT FOR SUBSCRIPTION OPTIONS PLEASE CONTACT REBECCA@INPRESSBOOKS.CO.UK.
COMING SOON...
NEW MAGAZINES
ACUMEN January, May & September
AGENDA April & September
ENVOI February, June & October
NAKED PUNCH One issue per year
BANIPAL March, June & November Summer 17: 9780995636927
THE NORTH Two issues per year
BRITTLE STAR Two issues per year
UNDER THE RADAR March, August & December
FOR INFORMATION ON SUBSCRIPTIONS & STANDING ORDERS FOR BOOKSHOPS PLEASE CONTACT ENQUIRIES@INPRESSBOOKS.CO.UK.
NEW INTRODUCING... TO THE MECHANICS INPRESS INSTITUTE REVIEW The Mechanics’ Institute Review is Birkbeck, University of London’s annual anthology of short fiction by emerging and established writers from across the UK. With 14 issues published to date, The Mechanics’ champions the short story as an art form, promoting inclusivity, diversity and opportunity while publishing new work of the highest possible standard. It has received critical acclaim from the Guardian, Independent, TLS and Time Out, and endorsements from Ali Smith, Damian Barr, Geoff Dyer, Tessa Hadley and Courttia Newland among many others. They have been privileged to feature more than 40 guest authors over the years, from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Evie Wyld via Zoe Gilbert, Jackie Kay, Rose Tremain and David Foster Wallace, to name but a prize-winning few. Meanwhile a significant number of the approximately 200 new authors they have published have found agents and landed contracts as a direct result of their inclusion in the anthology. Available in print and e-book format, The Mechanics’ was originally produced by students taking the Publishing option as part of their Creative Writing MA; since Issue 11, however, it has been produced by a team of volunteers. From Issue 14 onwards, thanks to funding from Arts Council England, The Mechanics’ has gone national, widening its reach beyond Birkbeck Creative Writing Programme students to find and develop talent from throughout the country.
Issue 15 features a oreword by Julia Bell and stories by Megan Bradbury, Ailsa Cox, Jonathan Kemp, Leone Ross, Amal Adam, Arhondia, Nigel Auchterlounie, Jay Barnett, Judy Birkbeck, Valentine Carter, Ian Critchley, Sarah Dale, Kate Ellis, Tim Goldstone, Vicky Grut, Ingrid Jendrzejewski, Lou Kramskoy, Nat Loftus, Len Lukowski, Laurane Marchive, David Martin, R. E. McAuliffe, Cheryl Powell, Josey Rebelle, Jane Roberts, Rachel Stevenson, Sogol Sur & Dean Tucker. 9781999962203 | £10.00 | PB | 26 September 2018
INDEX Antoni, Robert 33 Antrobus, Raymond 14 Aragon, Louis 12 Ayikwei Parkes, Nii 21 Benson, Lennox 46 Bernard, Jay 16 Blakemore, A.K 5 Boddy, Catharine 45 Bolton, Tom 40 Boniface-Webb, Tom 41 Booker, Malika 16 Borlenghi, Patricia 43 Bourne, Stephen 6 Branton, Melanie 27 Bromley, Carole 45 Brown, John Robert 26 Campanello, Kimberley 42 Carruthers Thomas, Kate 12 Casling, Dennis 13 Ciarán Hodgers 10 Contra 47 Cullinane, Majella 30 Deakin, Julia 17 DeWaal, Kit 41 Dhital, Sulochana Manandhar Doireann Ní Ghríofa 12 Drndić, Daša 33 Eavan Boland 28 Edwards, Jonathan 21 Etter, Carrie 15 Evans, Suzannah 23 Fan, Kit 5 Fitzmaurice, Gabriel 14 Flamingo, Ieva 47 Francois, Kat 16 Frémon, Jean 7 Fuks, Julian 32 Fulton, Sybrina 4 Giles, Harry Josephine 7 Goodman, Martin 36 Green, Jonathan 32 Gwyn, Richard 18 Hamilton, Diana 11 Harrold, A.F. 46
2
Hope, Danielle 17 Hopkins, Vernon 39 Hull, Isaiah 13 Jastrzebska, Maria 15 Jones, Jonah 40 Jovanović, Biljana 34 Jungeun, Hwang 32 Kalu, Peter 44 Kelly, John 13 Khan, Uzma Asla 4 Kingsnorth, Pau 25 Klikovac, Igor 22 Knapp, Cecilia 21 Kronbergs, Juris 46 Kunaratnam, Neetha 30 L.G. Vey 4 Longford, Shirley 3 Luitjers, Guus 15 Maithri, Maithri 2 Maliandi, Carla 37 Malik, Nadia 18 March, Char 17 Martin, Tracy 4 McCabe, Chris 6, 25 McCarthy Woolf, Karen 16 McCarthy, Michael 9 McFadden, Bernice L. 31 McFarlane, Roy 16 McGowan, Dave 35 McMillan, Andrew 41 Melvin-Geoghegan, Mary 9 Morris, John 41 Morrison, Kate 33 Mort, Helen 7 Nash, James 16 Natasha, Jenny 41 Nell, Dunn 41 Nhã Thuyên 3 Northwood, D.A 3 Ntshanga, Masande 4 O’Brien, Richard 26 Omar Cáceres 10 Ostups, Artis 11 Owen, Wilfred 22
Palfreyman, Louise 43 Pantling, Nigel 11 Parkin, Dean 45 Piercey, Rachel 43, 47 Potts, Cherry 37 Poynting, Jeremy 38 Quessep, Giovanni 26 Quirke, Liz 29 Raha, Nat 23 Rebecca Tamás 8 Revathi, Kutti 2 Robinson, Sophie 23 Rosenberg, Aaron 6 Ross, Jacob 38 Routh, Jane 20 Rowson, Martin 19 Rūta Briede 44,46 Salma 2 Savile, Stephen 6 Scego, Igiaba 37 Sexton, John W. 10 Sheehan, Eileen 24 Shin, Sarah 8 Singh, Yvonne 41 Skinner, Knute 24 Slease, Marcus 24 Smart, Adham 27 Stevens, Karen 36 Sukirtharani 2 Swensen, Cole 7 Syrad, Kay 20 Tait, David 9 Taylor-Battiste, Chérie 27 Taylor, Jonathan 36 Wakeling, Kate 45 Walton, Samantha 23 Watkins, Jean 18 Will, Jayde 11 Wilson, Ross 30 Woodburn, Mark 38 Wooldridge, Patricia Helen 14 Wright, Emma 26 43 47 Zaqtan, Ghassan 20