Small Press Newsletter Vol IV
Honford Star with great news, books from Castles in the Air Press, Divided Press, Holland Park Books, and an event with Inkandescent
RofC Book of the Month Club
More flexibility, more choice, and if we attract more subscribers, more money for the prize - and we need more money having lost Arts Council funding and others.
You can now either choose our selected title each month or a title of this year’s RofC Small Press Prize long list. All you have to do is sign-up and email us which books you want over the year, and we’ll send them to you in the middle of each month.
Or: if you don’t fancy that level of commitment: sign up to be a paid Substack subscriber and we’ll send you this year’s winning book.
Thank you. Neil Griffiths, Founder.
Honford Star
We have great news— Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi and translated by Jeremy Tiang, is longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2023!
Ninth Building is a fascinating collection of vignettes drawn from Zou Jingzhi’s experience growing up during the Cultural Revolution, first as a boy in Beijing and then as a teenager exiled to the countryside. Zou poetically captures a side of the Cultural Revolution that is less talked about—the sheer tedium and waste of young life, as well as the gallows humor that accompanies such desperate situations. Jeremy Tiang’s enthralling translation of this important work of fiction was awarded a PEN/Heim Grant.
Castles in the Air Press
Why are you here? by Radhika Iyer
Iyer explores the struggle of being a woman in different cultures, as the stories take us from the harrowing results of a family scandal in Malaysia, to an internal cultural identity struggle in Dubai, to an abusive marriage amplified by the lockdown in Ireland.
This collection is ultimately about the female experience, and being different culturally, and in terms of shape and size.
Radhika Iyer was born in Malaysia to migrant Indian parents. Her stories mainly explore themes of identity struggle, acceptance, and domestic violence.
Points of interest: Themes of: domestic violence; racism in Ireland; the immigrant experience in Ireland; lockdown in Ireland, 10% of book sales will be donated to the Immigrant Council of Ireland, published by a female-owned publishing press.
As well as the update that we are currently open for submissions and accepting them via email castlesintheairpress@gmail.com
Divided Press
In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities by James Joy
"Joy James’s Revolutionary Love is umph-degree love; or love beyond measure. It is anything love. It is love without reckoning. It is love that dares all things, beyond which others may find the spirit-force to survive; to live to fight another day. Such love is also fighting itself, for the sake of ensuring that others may live."
--Mumia Abu-Jamal
Violence is arrayed against us because we’re Black, or female, or queer, or undocumented. There is no rescue team coming for us. With that knowledge, we need a different operational base to recreate the world. It is not going to be a celebrity savior. Never was, never will be. If you’re in a religious tradition that is millennia-old, consider how the last savior went out. It was always going to be bloody. It was always going to be traumatic. But there’s a beauty to facing the reality of our lives. Not our lives as they’re broken apart, written about, and then sold back to us in academic or celebrity discourse. But our lives as we understand them. The most important thing is showing up. Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.
Inkandescent: BOLD queer poetry soirée
Inkandescent serve up spectacular spoken word with a side of music. Host Nathan Evans is joined by poet and activist lisa luxx and Kostya Tsolakis, founding editor of harana poetry. Plus our very first open mic.Thursday 30th March, doors 19:30, show 19:45
Betsey Trotwood, 56 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3BL
£10 (general admission) £5 (open mic)
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/546429785197
Holland Park Press
The Way to Hornsey Rise, an autobiographical novel by Jeremy Worman, explores how a privately educated schoolboy comes to reject his comfortable rural Surrey background to end up in the squats, drugs and hippy scene of 1970s Hornsey Rise.
‘A fascinating and candid coming-of-age novelised-memoir, seasoned with phenomenal recall and a perfectly-pitched tone of voice. Wholly beguiling.’ – William Boyd
‘This memoir is a compulsive read. It rips away the veneer of the British upper-middle classes, showing them to be venal, despairing, corrupt.’ – Francis Gilbert
‘The Way to Hornsey Rise slips down like a glass of real lemonade on a hot afternoon, its sweet and bitter notes beautifully balanced. A sentimental education without illusions.’ – Ferdinand Mount
‘Surprising, even shocking, above all beautifully written. Do read it. You won’t be disappointed.’ – Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson
‘Taking us from the class-bound stockbroker belt suburbs of Surrey in the 1960s, all minor public schools and gin sozzled adultery, to the squats of North London in the 1970s, this is a book rich in period detail and atmosphere, and its account of a young man’s painful progress from innocence to experience as compellingly universal as it is highly specific of a time and place.’ – Travis Elborough
Published by Holland Park Press on 23 March 2023.
See you next week