It’s another busy newsletter this month with lots of new releases, events, a special offer, workshops, a call for new work, and more. This time featuring:
Saqi Books
Inkandescent
Pilot Press
The 87 Press
And Other Stories
Ortac Press
Grand Iota
Comma Press
Another newsletter coming very soon!
I’ll get right to it this time - Substack is already tutting at me that this post is approaching “too long for email” and I’d rather squeeze in the words of another press or two. But I just wanted to say that while working on these newsletters over the last month or so, it’s heartening to see that you put a call out there - in the hope you aren’t pestering people, falling into a spam folder somewhere - and what comes back is not just what everyone’s working on, but a range of responses to the moment and something communal happens.
I hope this newsletter gives a sense of that, and the bookish communities and new writing out there.
- Alex
We are offering 25% off our Palestine titles with the code SaqiPalestine. All profits will be donated directly to Medical Aid Palestine who are working tirelessly to provide aid to those in need in Palestine. We have many close personal and professional relationships being affected by the events happening in Gaza, and this is the least we feel we can do to support those suffering on the ground.
Thursday 2nd November 18:30
Common Press, 118 Bethnal Green Road, London E2 6DG
Inkandescent launch their new edition of The Disappearance Boy by Neil Bartlett, which includes an afterword with mentalist Derren Brown. There will be a reading and signings, and a special performance by showwoman Marisa Carnesky.
In his acclaimed fourth novel, Neil Bartlett once again performs his trademark trick of slipping into the hidden spaces of queer history and bringing them vividly to life.
Neil Bartlett’s novels include Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, Mr Clive and Mr Page and Skin Lane; they’ve been nominated for the Whitbread Prize, the Costa Award and the Polari Prize. Address Book was published by Inkandescent and was an Observer Book of the Year 2021. Neil also makes theatre, and wrote the script for Orlando, which openned in the West End in 2022, starring Emma Corrin.
Pilot Press is seeking responses to ‘Forbidden Colours’ (1988) by Félix González-Torres for the seventh anthology in a series commemorating works of art made during the AIDS Crisis. 100% of the proceeds from sales will be donated to @medicalaidpal.
Please send your contributions as soon as possible to pilotpresslondon@gmail.com.
Please format all work to page size A5 / font size 10. Images should be max 5mb. As with other titles in the series, responses do not have to reference the work or subject matter directly. The work is merely a springboard.
Here is an excerpt from an accompanying statement by González-Torres for the work’s first showing at New York’s New Museum in 1988:
‘It is a fact people are discriminated against for being HIV positive. It is a fact the majority of the Nazi industrialists retained their wealth after war. It is a fact the night belongs to Michelob and Coke is real. It is a fact the color of your skin matters. It is a fact Crazy Eddie’s prices are insane. It is a fact that four colors red, black, green and white placed next to each other in any form are strictly forbidden by the Israeli army in the occupied Palestinian territories. This color combination can cause an arrest, a beating, a curfew, a shooting, or a news photograph. Yet it is a fact that these forbidden colors, presented as a solitary act of consciousness here in SoHo, will not precipitate a similar reaction. From the first moment of encounter, the four colour canvases in this room will “speak” to everyone. Some will define them as an exercise in color theory, or some sort of abstraction. Some as four boring rectangular canvases hanging on the wall. Now that you’ve read this text, I hope for a different message.
For all the PWAs.’
While the ban on the Palestinian flag was lifted by the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, it is still abundantly clear that to show any kind of solidarity, empathy or support for Palestine and its people remains deeply divisive and sometimes criminalised.
We believe the word “queer” should mean an identification and solidarity with oppressed and brutalised people everywhere.
*** REGISTRATION BELOW; DATES MAY BE DIFFERENT THAN ADVERTISED - POSTPONEMENT NOTICE: https://www.the87press.co.uk/thehythe-open/conditional-liberation-is-not-liberation ***
Rogelio Braga - Creative Writing vs. The Hostile Environment
6 - 8pm GMT on zoom 5th, 12th, 19th, and 26th of November 2023
Further details and sign-up here.
"How do you tell your story as a migrant? Why do you need to tell your stories in the first place? What should you bring from your place of origin to the United Kingdom when negotiating your narratives? Is there an infrastructure that is allowing you to negotiate and you have the control over your narratives? Should writing about the hostile environment be considered political? What is migrant political writing?
These are just some of the questions Creative Writing vs. The Hostile Environment will seek to explore in this four-week online course designed for migrants with various migration status living in the UK, for those who are interested in the location of migration narratives within the UK’s hostile environment, and for students of creative writing wishing to practise solidarity."
And Other Stories' exclusive subscription club!
Join our subscription club for only £70 a year (print books) or £35 a year (eBooks) to enjoy early access to six new books by celebrated international authors and translators, delivered right to your doorstep. As a subscriber, you not only get these books before anyone else but also see your name featured in each book for making it all possible.
Subscribe by November 1, 2023, and receive Lublin by Manya Wilkinson as your first subscription book. While Lublin officially hits the UK shelves on February 6, 2024, our subscribers will be flipping through its pages in January 2024, with their names proudly printed within. Check out our website's subscription timeline for updates about our next subscription books.
About Lublin by Manya Wilkinson
Elya, Kiva and Ziv – three young Jewish lads from Mezritsh, who set off to seek their fortune by selling a case of bristle brushes in the great market town of Lublin. They brave drought, visions, bad shoes, Russian soldiers, cohorts of abandoned women, burnt porridge, dead dogs, haemorrhoids, incessant sneezing, constipation, and bad jokes, and quickly find that nothing, not Elya’s jokes nor Kiva’s prayers nor Ziv’s sublime irritatingness, can prepare them for the future as it comes barrelling down to meet them.
Lublin is the first book in thirty years from Manya Wilkinson (previously published as Margaret Wilkinson by Serpent's Tail), after she focused on radio scripts and teaching for many years. What a comeback! It's hilarious and heart-breaking, the dialogue is devastatingly sharp and the pacing extraordinary.
It is a novel that may be set in the journey of three Jewish lads in the hostile environment of 1907 Tsarist Russia but doesn't feel like 'historical fiction' at all. No belaboured 'background' here! Think more of the film Stand by Me and the humour of Woody Allen and all the other great Jewish New Yorkers (as Manya Wilkinson is) mixed with the absurdist logic of Beckett's Waiting for Godot!
London Event for the The Fugitive of Gezi Park (Ortac Press)
Battersea Bookshop, London; 6th November 18:30-20:00
Author Deniz Goran will be in conversation with Richard Dyer (Editor in Chief of Third Text) at Battersea Bookshop, the new bookshop at Battersea Power Station. It should be an interesting evening, in a wonderful space. More information and purchase tickets here.
'The Fugitive of Gezi Park is a gripping, sometimes comic and more often tragic portrayal of two complex, flawed characters and cities. Without ever mentioning Erdoğan’s name, it offers a finely grained study of how Turkey’s descent into dictatorship has torn through human lives.' The TLS
Deniz Goran is bestselling author of the novel The Turkish Diplomat’s Daughter first published in Turkey in 2007. The novel was also published in the UK, Italy, Germany, Greece and Taiwan. Deniz Goran is the pseudonym of Selin Tamtekin, a Turkish-British novelist and art writer based in London. The Fugitive of Gezi Park is her second novel.
Richard Dyer is Editor in Chief of Third Text; he was News Editor and London Correspondent for Contemporary magazine for ten years. His critical writing has appeared in Contemporary, Frieze, Flash Art, Art Review, Art Press, Third Text, Wasafiri, The Independent, The Guardian, Time Out and many other publications and catalogues. His artistic practice ranges from performance, photography, text installation and painting to constructions and sculpture employing mixed media.
Grand Iota
The prose imprint of long-running independent poetry press Reality Street, publishes its 17th and 18th books side by side this November. We can’t believe we’ve really published so many books in our short history, but somehow we have.
GRAND IOTA, an initiative of Brian Marley and Reality Street’s founder Ken Edwards, was launched in 2019. It is dedicated to imaginative prose writing - whether novels, short stories, memoirs or completely unclassifiable prose. Our strapline is “Books that are out of the ordinary, hard to categorise but good to read”.
This autumn’s books are You Know There’s Something by veteran Seattle-based poet and novelist John Olson, and a second Grand Iota outing for James Russell, ex-Cambridge Professor of Cognitive Development, whose book of four stories, The Griffin Brain, joins his previous comic novel Greater London in our roster.
"Olson – as he has for years – effortlessly interweaves philosophy, personal experience, mystical thought and pop culture, exposing a thread that is contentedly restless,” writes US poet George Kalamaras. He continues: "As he asks, ‘Is there intelligent life elsewhere in space? Is there a parallel universe where people walk on the ceiling and poetry is the highest paid profession? Who wrote The Book of Love, and where can I get a copy?’ Okay, you can find The Book of Love by grabbing this stunning new book by the horns but allowing it to wrestle you to the ground!”
And here’s Ian Patterson on James Russell: “Jim Russell is a virtuoso of the conflicts at the heart of social life, the endlessly dismaying comedy that underlies and shapes both philosophical thinking and daily living. These stories match stylistic irony with every other sort of mismatch, from embarrassment to hubris, from disguise to delusion to desperation to dreaming. Pacy, intelligent and witty, they draw us into an illusion-skewering depiction of the everyday world of surreal banalities we all inhabit.”
We only publish books we love, and we love these. More information here.
Check out all our previous books here.
Comma announce new ‘Futures Past’ Title, coming 2nd Nov:
Building on the success of previous series entries, Kurdistan +100 breaks new ground in imagining an ethnic homeland of the Kurdish people in 2046, 100 years after the last glimmer of Kurdish national independence was extinguished at the fall of Mahabad.
Kurdistan +100 asks its thirteen writers one question: might the Kurds in 2046 have a nation of their own, or will the struggle for independence evolve new forms?
The first ever anthology of Kurdish Science Fiction, Kurdistan +100 provides a platform to thirteen Kurdish writers whose identities are often criminalised, including several former political prisoners and one currently serving a 183-year sentence for his views.