Fiction Desk News Archive

(The following post is an extended version of the introduction to our anthology The Maginot Line. There were a couple of things I couldn’t talk about there, as I hadn’t seen a finished copy of the third anthology at the time of writing it.)

In the introduction to our first anthology, I wrote briefly about the background to the series, and why I decided to relaunch The Fiction Desk as a publishing house. In All These Little Worlds, I wrote a little about the process of putting the anthologies together, why we don’t do themed anthologies, and the way themes have a habit of emerging anyway.

In The Maginot Line, I thought I’d write about something really superficial: our covers.

We try to have a broad editorial policy, but it more or less amounts to a focus on traditional narratives with strong characters. To reflect those traditional values, I set certain limitations for our cover images: the designs can only consist of paper and the written word.

Various Authors

The cover of Various Authors was in my mind for almost as long as the anthology series itself. I made a couple of tests (below left) by hacking away at scrap paper with a fruit knife, before upgrading to a sheet torn from a sketchbook (but the same fruit knife) for the final version.

The handwritten text is a deliberately rambling version of the editorial policy, and specifically talks about our openness to genre, and the limitations of that; I seem to remember there being some reference to elves, although I can’t find it on the cover now. The reference was not entirely complimentary.

The figures were drawn on the back of the paper, cut out along three sides and folded to stand up. I think it worked rather well, though it suffers from the rather shouty typesetting of the title (which I’ve done my best to tidy up in subsequent volumes).

All These Little Worlds

The crumpled sheets of paper on the cover of All These Little Worlds are pages torn out of advance copies of Various Authors; copies that had been sent out to bookshops but returned to us with their envelopes marked ‘closed down’ or ‘out of business’. Each one therefore represents a different vanished bookshop, and while the title was originally intended to refer to the stories themselves, in retrospect it could equally apply to those lost shops.

The chalk was a nice bit of synchronicity given that the anthology ended up containing several stories related to education. (Technically those chalked lines probably aren’t ‘the written word’, making this a small bending of the rules, but we can call them dashes if you like.)

The Maginot Line

The cover of The Maginot Line is based on the title story, which opens the anthology. There’s a significance to the kind and order of the leaves, but you’ll discover that for yourself when you read Matt’s excellent story. This was the first cover for which I allowed myself real tools, rather than kitchen utensils: The Fiction Desk’s petty cash stretched to a cutting mat and craft knife.

The background to this cover is a sheet of paper made of elephant poo, which seemed to have the right sort of texture.

Make of that what you will.

Late unlamented laminate

The Maginot Line is also the first of our covers to be printed without any sort of laminate: the thin plastic coating that’s applied to almost all paperbacks published these days. Conventional wisdom seems to have it that a book just isn’t professionally finished without a laminated cover, but I’ve grown to really dislike it.

Laminate may protect books (slightly), but when the book does get damaged, the damage is plasticky in a way that looks incredibly cheap and unbookish: the thin plastic film starts to wrinkle, or blister, or peel like dead skin. When an unlaminated book gets knocked or scratched, it may lose a little ink, gain a white scuff mark or two, but it still looks a lot more like a book.

The laminate problem is also made worse by digital printing, as digital inks tend to prevent the laminate from bonding properly. That’s why so many digital books have nasty-looking thick glossy laminated covers: it’s an attempt to get it to stick on. To see the difference, compare a copy of All These Little Worlds (printed digitally and laminated) with a copy of Various Authors (traditionally printed and laminated). The Maginot Line is printed using the same processes as All These Little Worlds, but without the laminate. Personally, I think it has the nicest feel of all three volumes, and has my favourite cover design too.

I don’t think we’ll ever use laminate again for a Fiction Desk title, unless there’s a very good reason for it.

A quick post to let you know that our new anthology, The Maginot Line, should be out by the end of next week. It’s running a few days late (blame Easter), but it’s well on the way. As ever, subscription copies and pre-orders will be sent out by first class post (or airmail) as soon as the copies arrive from the printers.

Ebook editions may be available a few days earlier: I’ll update the blog and our Twitter feed as the various formats are released.

In the meantime, have a good Easter.

Today we can finally announce our new anthology, The Maginot Line.

The Maginot Line contains nine new stories, including stories from returning authors Andrew Jury and Harvey Marcus, and the debut story from Benjamin Johncock.

Copies should be available from April 7th, in paperback and ebook formats – and of course, the first copies will be sent out to our subscribers.

For full details, head over to The Maginot Line.

I’m delighted to see that our anthologies are now being stocked by Shakespeare & Company, one of the world’s most iconic bookshops.

Although we’ve got subscribers in quite a few countries now, most of our bookshop sales to date have been at home in the UK, so it’s great to be on sale in France too.

Find out more about Shakespeare & Company at their website here, and if you’re in Paris, make sure you drop by.

(And if you’re a bookshop interested in stocking us, drop me a line, or get in touch with our distributors Central Books.)

The votes are all in, and it’s time to announce that James Benmore has won the Fiction Desk Writer’s Award, for his story ‘Jaggers & Crown’. As well as the credit from his colleagues, James will be getting a cheque for £200 from The Fiction Desk, which should keep him in ballpoint pens for a while.

Read more about the award here, and if you’ve not yet read James’s winning story, you’ll want to grab a copy of All These Little Worlds.

Above are the first volumes in our Christmas gift subscriptions, wrapped and ready to go out to their lucky recipients.

The paper we’re using is from The Paper Place in Rye (their site is still under construction). Their paper is handmade in India using traditional techniques and materials, and it’s beautiful stuff.

The wrapped books are volumes one and two, which we’re shipping out in time for Christmas; volumes three and four are also included in the subscription, and will be sent out on publication next year.

If you know somebody who’d love this for Christmas, you’ll find all the details, along with last order dates for Christmas delivery, over on our special Christmas subscription page. (You’ll need to order within the next couple of days for delivery outside the UK…)

Here’s Colin Corrigan, writing about the background to his new story ‘The Romantic’, which appears in All These Little Worlds.

Isn’t life great, sometimes? Except for when it all turns to shit. Except for how we’re all going to, one way or another, die, and then be forgotten, as our souls return to the void of the insignificant. Which they never really left. But, then, there’s chocolate fudge cake. The curve of a waist. A sunrise.

‘The Romantic’ began with the somewhat cartoonish idea of a poet who has never been in love, and so can only write very bad poetry. My hero, Martin, came to mind pretty easily, a chump who deludes himself into the idea that he’s a fine poet, and that he’s enjoying what for most people would be a terribly lonely existence.

From there, the story kind of took on a life of its own. Posed with the problem of how Martin survives without working (or publishing his poems), it occurred to me that he might be living off compensation he has received after an industrial accident. Researching accidents, I came across a report of a man who lost an arm after being dragged into a printing press. A missing arm seemed to make sense, for Martin, a symbolic extension of his lack (with the extra irony of his being maimed by the publishing industry). It also worked nicely, as the story unfurled, to serve as a reality with which he would be confronted.

The character came to mind pretty easily because Martin is, largely, me, stubborn as I am about being a writer when there are plenty of material reasons why another career might offer more security, less stress, and a bigger car. I too find new ways to lie to myself every day.

Because he represents, perhaps, my more vulnerable side, I wanted to be mean to him, and it was inevitable that by the story’s end he was going to be crushed under the weight of his own delusions. When the realisation hits him that his poetry has had an entirely different effect upon Aoife, a girl he meets, than he had hoped and expected, I am like her: part of me wants to laugh at Martin, and the other part to apologise.

— Colin Corrigan

There’s been a lot of talk lately about publications charging small fees for online submissions. In the States, for example, both Ploughshares and the Missouri Review charge US$3 per submission. The idea is that the fee is set at about the level of printing and buying stamps for a posted submission, and helps to contribute to the costs of processing the submissions.

Opinions are divided on these fees: some people think it’s a good way to help raise money for publishing projects, while others feel that it’s an unfair burden on the writers.

Personally, I agree with many of the points made on both sides of the argument, and I’d certainly feel very uncomfortable about setting a fixed submission fee for The Fiction Desk. However, we do need the revenue: right now, only around one in three hundred of the people who submit actually purchase a single copy of our books, let alone a subscription. Even with other sales coming in from elsewhere, the figures just don’t add up. What this ultimately means is that there’s less time available for us to spend going through the submissions.

I’ve decided therefore to set up a voluntary submission fee, of £2 per story (about US$3). There’s now an option to pay the fee on our submissions form. You don’t have to pay it—writers who’d rather not can simply leave the box unchecked—but if you do, you’ll be helping to contribute to our running costs, which in turn will help us to promote the short story form.

There’s a side benefit too: our usual response time is three months, but where a submission fee is paid, we’ll make sure we reply within two weeks.

I think this voluntary system may be the best compromise between having an open submissions policy, and the need to raise money.

Let’s see how it goes.

Here’s author Danny Rhodes talking about the inspiration behind ‘A Covering of Leaves’, which appeared in our first anthology, Various Authors.

I wrote ‘A Covering of Leaves’ after reading an interview (with Stephen King I think…) in which he explained how after 9-11 the New York authorities continually came across vehicles owned by people who had died in the attacks. These cars were found abandoned in parking lots and at kerb edges around the city and, I surmised, more often than not, in the car parks of subway stations in the suburbs. Thinking about this I started to imagine family members collecting these vehicles in the aftermath of a catastrophic event. But what of those vehicles owned by victims who did not have any family? How long would those cars sit gathering parking tickets and suffering the casual onslaught of seasonal weather?

The story idea came pretty quickly after that, suggesting as some have said before, that stories exist to be discovered by writers. Initially Webster’s journey took him into the home of the victim, where he discovered the loss she had already suffered, the remnants of a failed marriage etc. I chose to omit these scenes in later edits as I tried to get to the crux of the story.

The leaf fall soon took on metaphorical qualities, becoming a veil that Webster has to sweep away in order to discover the next part of his life journey, but it also served a narrative function, being the initial cause of the loss he endured.

I did not expect to be writing a story about a car that mourns its deceased owner and a man who is already mourning the loss of his wife but that’s the story that emerged. And I think ‘A Covering of Leaves’ is essentially about that, about mourning and managing in the aftermath of the death of a loved one, or not managing, in seeking some sort of path back to the place where there was happiness and togetherness, however unusual the route a person might take to reach that place.

— Danny Rhodes

The first review of All These Little Worlds has been posted, by Valerie O’Riordan over at Bookmunch. I’m pleased to see that it’s a good one, with the reviewer rating All These Little Worlds even more highly than Various Authors. You can read the review here.

Getting the first reviews is always exciting, almost regardless of whether they’re positive or negative. (One of the stranger aspects of moving from book blogging to publishing is finding oneself at the sharp end of a sword that one was previously wielding, and realising just how pointy it actually is.) As we have a tight publication schedule, review copies tend to go out around publication date, meaning that we have to wait a few weeks for the first ones to come in. It’s a tense wait, but when they do arrive, it’s interesting to see the different perspectives on the stories, and on the anthology as a whole. I’m always proud and excited when a story is received well, and when it hasn’t gone down well, I have to think about whether I could have presented the story better, perhaps through placing it elsewhere in the book, or next to other stories.

The order of stories in the book is one of the things that Valerie picks up on in the review, and it’s a key part of the editor’s art. Maxwell Perkins, the famous Scribner’s editor who worked with the likes of Fitzgerald and Hemingway*, believed in arranging anthologies with the strongest story collections at the beginning, middle, and end, with the weaker ones filling the gaps between. That’s a good approach, but much more practical with single-author collections than with anthologies containing multiple authors. (For a start, if you always do that, then the authors might take an implied insult to their work from where you put them…) Planning the order of stories in a multi-author collection takes in other ideas about theme, pacing, length, style and so on. It’s a fascinating skill, a big part of putting together an anthology, and one that I’m just now beginning (I hope) to acquire. It’s nice to see a reviewer address the order of stories.

Anyway, it’s a very interesting review, and does a good job of explaining what’s in the book, and perhaps also why you should read it. So go and have a look!

* And many others; Perkins had a fascinating career, which involved him with many of what we now think of as the great American authors of the period. It’s worth tracking down a copy of A Scott Berg’s biography if you can find one.

In the early days of planning our anthology series, I worried about whether we’d have the resources to find enough writers from abroad, allowing us to feature an international blend of stories. In the event, I’ve been surprised to find that we have the opposite problem: despite being based in the UK, it’s been a real challenge for us to find British short story writers. We’ve been working hard to increase awareness, getting in touch with all sorts of different organisations around the country, but just 10% of our submissions come from the UK.

As this is National Short Story Week in Britain, it seems like a good time to ask: where are our new short story writers?

I’m not talking about famous, established, or dead writers, you understand. Let’s not get sidetracked by shouting ‘Somerset Maugham’ and ‘Graham Greene’ and, I don’t know, ‘M R James’ at each other. (Although we maybe should save that for another time.) I’m concerned with the new writers: the ones who are maybe just producing their first publishable material, or who have begun to make a name for themselves with longer works, and are now starting to take an interest in the short story. I’m thinking of the people who might be publishing their first collections in two or three years’ time, and who should now be placing their first stories and starting to get their names in front of readers. These are the kinds of authors that we’ve been featuring in our anthologies, and these are the kinds of authors that it’s hard to find in the UK.

We’ve been pretty active about encouraging more submissions from British authors. Aside from some online appeals (which have done very well), we’ve also worked with more than a dozen universities around the country, providing books to creative writing courses for workshopping, hopefully to encourage students to work with the short story. We’ve also contacted independent writing groups to encourage their members to send in material.

One problem is that short stories, especially new short stories, just aren’t widely read in the UK. Often, an otherwise keen reader will tell me that they simply “don’t read short stories”. For obvious reasons, this makes it hard for British publishers to maintain a regular, quality publication: when stories are published, it’s often with very limited resources, meaning the stories aren’t great, or are only by big names, or are Worthy rather than entertaining. As a result, readers don’t come back for more, and the momentum never builds.

(British short story publishing may be at its healthiest today not in mainstream fiction but in genre publishing, where the editors and writers still keep in mind—more often than not—the ability of short stories to entertain.)

It’s sometimes said that the short story is more an American form than a British one, but I don’t really believe that. The UK has produced some terrific short story writers in the past, and there are some around today too. I do think though that the Americans are better at promoting short stories: they have more magazines and journals, which they take more seriously. As a result, they have more opportunities to write and read quality short fiction.

I hope that The Fiction Desk’s anthology series will in its own small way help to improve the situation in the UK. By giving the country a decent quarterly publication dedicated to new short fiction, I hope we can encourage writers to write short stories, and encourage readers to buy and read them. If you’re a writer and you think you might have a story for us, you’ll find our submissions information here.

And if you’re a reader, please consider taking out a subscription to the anthology series, because the best way to support new writing is to read it, and because you might just be surprised by how much you enjoy it. You’ll find subscription information here.

James Benmore‘s story ‘Jaggers & Crown’, which features in our anthology All These Little Worlds, follows the careers of a fictional comedy duo from the days of music hall, through radio, to television. It’s an excellent story, with a strong voice, and I was curious about how James came to write it. He’s been kind enough to provide this guest post, explaining the background of the story.

The story`Jaggers & Crown’ was very much inspired by my interest in British comedy programmes from the fifties and sixties, particularly radio shows such as Hancock’s Half Hour, The Goon Show and Round the Horne. Round the Horne is an especially fascinating programme: it was daring, ahead of its time, and the sketches involving the late Kenneth Williams are so funny and shocking considering homosexuality was still illegal back when they were recoreded.

Williams played one half of Julian and Sandy, who were gay in both senses of the word, and whose dialogue dripped with clever innuendo. I’m told that back then, many listeners would not have understood all the double meanings. It then occurred to me that as time went on, in the seventies and eighties, that depictions of homosexuality became more sadder and sexless, such as Mr Humphrey in Are You Being Served, who lived with his mother and was the butt of many homophobic remarks, and that sparked my interest in writing a short fictional journey through this period.

If Sonny Jaggers is based on anyone, it’s probably Kenneth Williams who was gay, took his own life and whose posthumous diaries showed he suffered from acute depression and had a spiteful streak. I also drew on the life of Tony Hancock, another depressive, an alcoholic and someone who also killed himself, as well as Peter Sellers who reguarly visited clairvoyants and wanted to be taken seriously as an actor.

Crown is more of a short cockney Norman Wisdom type in terms of his performance type. A loveable fool. But his real character isn’t modelled on anyone famous. I was more interested in creating an unreliable narrator and a false friend. Someone who admires and loves Sonny but who doesn’t have the courage to be him. — James Benmore

Above is a photo of the bound proof copy of our new anthology All These Little Worlds, which arrived this morning. This is the test copy, sent to us by the printers so that I can check everything is as it should be, and that I’ve not accidentally set all the pages upside down, or made the spine an inch too thick.

It’s all looking good, and the presses are running on the finished copies as I speak.

Finished copies will be going out to subscribers early next week, so there’s still time to subscribe! (Of course, you can also order it through your local bookshop or library.)

We’ve also posted a free .pdf sample, with the first few pages of each story. You can download that from the main anthology page.

It’s taken a little longer than expected, but I’m delighted to announce the imminent publication of our second anthology, All These Little Worlds.

All These Little Worlds contains nine new stories, including a special long story from Charles Lambert. (Several of the stories here are longer than the stories in Various Authors, as much by chance as anything, and I do think it gives the stories more time to build their worlds.)

Two contributors from Various Authors are returning for the new book, both with very different stories to their previous contributions. I’d originally considered Charles Lambert‘s ‘Pretty Vacant’ for that first book, but in the end it was too long to fit so we ran the equally good but shorter ‘All I Want’ instead. Since then, I’ve never quite managed to get ‘Pretty Vacant’ out of my mind. It’s Charles at his best, and fortunately I managed to grab it for All These Little Worlds.

Our other returning author is Jason Atkinson. His ‘Assassination Scene’ went down well in Various Authors; ‘Get on Green’ is a very different story, and shows off his range.

I think it’s good to have a few repeat visits from our contributors, as it gives the series a sense of continuity, but the main thrust of the anthology series is to showcase a variety of writers and writing, and the other seven contributors to All These Little Worlds are new to us.

Mischa Hiller should need no introduction: his two novels with Telegram have been critically acclaimed. (They’re crying out for movie adaptations too, especially the Hitchcockian Shake Off.) His story ‘Room 307′ represents a real change of pace from the novels.

If you read a lot of new short fiction, you probably already know about the American quarterly Electric Literature. Their editor Halimah Marcus has contributed ‘Dress Code’, one of several stories here with a school connection, although each is different: while ‘Dress Code’ follows the troubles of a new teacher, ‘Get on Green’ shows a schoolday from the perspective of a young African-American girl. Ryan Shoemaker‘s ‘After All the Fun We Had’ is the story of one principal’s attempt to engage bored students by injecting a little entertainment.

Colin Corrigan‘s story ‘The Romantic’ is a curiosity that I don’t intend to say too much about here. Colin was recently published in The Stinging Fly. Jennifer Moore provides some light entertainment in her story ‘Swimming With the Fishes’, while Andrew Jury opens a window on the relationship between a recently separated man and his mother-in-law in ‘”Glenda”‘.

Finally, James Benmore‘s ‘Jaggers & Crown’ is part story, part potted history of the transition from vaudeville comedy to television sketch shows. It’s a particularly interesting one, and I’ve asked James to blog here about the background to the story. Watch out for his post, coming up in the next couple of weeks.

Here are the contents in full (though not in order):

• Halimah Marcus – Dress Code
• Andrew Jury – “Glenda”
• James Benmore – Jaggers & Crown
• Colin Corrigan – The Romantic
• Ryan Shoemaker – After All the Fun We Had
• Jennifer Moore – Swimming with the Fishes
• Jason Atkinson – Get on Green
• Mischa Hiller – Room 307
• Charles Lambert – Pretty Vacant

Copies of All These Little Worlds will be sent out to subscribers as soon as they’re back from the printers, which should be around the end of September. For more information, or to pre-order if you haven’t subscribed, see All These Little Worlds.

The Martello Bookshop, a lovely independent in Rye, East Sussex, is stocking Various Authors. There it is, right there, at the top left of the fiction section. It’s a terrific bookshop, so worth dropping in if you find yourself in town.

The publication of our first book has been followed, fortunately, by our first reviews. Even more fortunately, they’ve been very positive. I thought it might be worth rounding up some of what people have been saying about Various Authors.

The first one to come in was from Nylon Magazine:

From the creepy clone tale “Celia and Harold” to the heartwarming “Nativity,” these are 20-pagers that you can squeeze in at the gym, on the subway, or even in line at the grocery store.

Although we’re left wanting more when it’s all over, we don’t have to worry. It’s a quarterly anthology, which means there’s another load of mini-books on the way very soon.

If Nylon found the stories to be perfect reading for the grocery store (and they are! They are!), All Metaphor enjoyed the more serious side:

The authors of the dozen stories in this debut volume do not include any household names, but several can boast respectable track records, with novels or short story collections already in print. This is serious stuff: literary fiction of a high calibre, the contributors not genre writers but artists of the pen. (Though is there any reason why a genre writer shouldn’t be an artist too?)

(Of course there isn’t. Bring on the genre writers!) All Metaphor went on to highlight three stories written either by Americans, or with international settings:

The three stories that stand out here all have overseas settings and two of them are written by Americans. All I Want by Charles Lambert is about English teachers spending an uneasy weekend with an Italian family by Lake Garda, and is stiff with unspoken feeling. Nativity by Adrian Stumpp addresses the rarely described anguish of fatherhood. Topping the lot for me is Dave Tough’s Luck by Matthew Licht. This occupies familiar Licht territory in 1970s New York, but transcends the grubbiness and slease with a poignant account of an idiot savant drummer who can reproduce all the riffs of the jazz and rock greats but never create a thing himself.

Speaking of genres and the pointlessness of rigid barriers between them, it was great to get a review on the British Fantasy Society’s website:

Sometimes one has to read outside the confines of genre. And as much as I love fantasy/horror short stories there are times when I need to go off at a tangent. This is where Various Authors comes in. (Of course, one could argue that all fiction is just a bunch of lies and is, ergo, a form of fantasy fiction – but I’ll not go that route today.) Anyway … this anthology features twelve new stories from authors I’m not familiar with but, judging from their contributions, writers I’d like to encounter again.

Scott Pack was the first to review a specific story, singling out Lynsey May‘s ‘Two Buses Away’ for his blog Me and My Short Stories:

This is a well observed piece of writing. Uncomfortable and unsettling. I shall be dipping in further during the coming weeks.

He also had praise for the anthology series as a whole:

Once a quarter we will see a new anthology of short stories and if this first volume is anything to go by – featuring two of my favourite authors, Danny Rhodes and Charles Lambert – then we are in for a seasonal treat four times a year. [...] If you like the idea of what The Fiction Desk is doing then you can subscribe for one year over at the website. It only costs £26.99 which is not at all bad for 4 books and nearly 50 stories a year.

A couple of people picked up on the introduction, and drew some parallels between our publishing venture and the independent music scene. Winston’s Dad had this to say:

I leave you there with the stories if you want to know more go out and support Rob, there isn’t a bad story in this collection to use the time-worn phrase they are all page turners and to take it back to Rob’s starting point of a dj, well this book is like the semi legendary NME MIXTAPE C86, which collected a group of acts in 1986, some were couple of hit wonders and some went on to be huge, this collection has tha feel anyone here could be huge and sure someone from this collection will but who or when is hard to say but if this is Rob’s mix of new writing in English, well it looks like we’re in good health.

…while Pauline Masurel at The Short Review concluded:

The premise of The Fiction Desk anthology collection appears to be to build up a subscriber base for this series of quarterly publications. But who subscribes to regularly buy collections of fiction from a range of (largely) unknown authors? Well, strange to tell, I’ve actually taken a punt on it myself – for the serendipity. In the same way that I sometimes listened to John Peel on the radio. I may not have liked all the music he chose, but I could be sure that he loved it or he wouldn’t be playing it. So too with Rob Redman’s selections. This feels like a very personal project and I was encouraged enough by what I read in Various Authors to tune in for the next installment.

The Review Review has detailed reviews of half a dozen individual stories, which are well worth reading, and summarises:

There were a couple of laugh-until-you-pee stories, some break-your-heart stories, and one or two I’m-not-sure-how-to-feel-now-but-I-liked-it stories. A couple of stories wobbled in places—an instance or two of awkward wording, perhaps—but I enjoyed the material enough that I never did give up on any of them, and I cheered the anthology on until its gorgeous, sweet, hysterical final story.

Finally, it doesn’t really count as a review, but Charles Lambert wrote a nice piece about the origins of the series on his blog:

The UK doesn’t really have a decent short story quarterly; those publications that do exist often feel too small-pressy, for economic reasons, or self-serving, for editorial ones. Granta, as far as I know, hasn’t published an unsolicited or un-agented piece of modern fiction for years. Rob’s plan was to produce something that looked, felt and read like a real book. Something that readers would be proud to own and writers proud to appear in. On the strength of the first number, Various Authors, he’s done just that.

So there you have it, all the reviews so far (not counting the ones on Goodreads and Amazon… phew!) The response has been fantastic, and hugely encouraging as we get to work on the next anthologies. And if you haven’t subscribed yet yourself, what are you waiting for?

As part of our commitment to encouraging new short fiction, we’re presenting a cash prize for the best story in each of our anthologies. The prize is judged by the contributors themselves, each of whom gets one main vote, and one secondary vote to be used in the event of a tie. The amount of the prize will vary, but the Various Authors prize is £200.

We did run into one little snag, though: despite the use of the secondary vote, we still wound up with a three-way tie. Jon Wallace, Matthew Licht, and Ben Lyle all received the same number of main and secondary votes.

Rather than toss a (three-sided?) coin, we decided to call in a special celebrity guest judge. Who better for this than respected book blogger and Twitter gadabout John Self, keeper of The Asylum?

John was kind enough to read the three stories and select the winner for us. I’m therefore pleased to announce that the winner of the Various Authors Prize is… Ben Lyle, for ‘Crannock House’. Here’s what John said:

I liked it because it surprises the reader’s expectations and doesn’t explain everything, and despite its short length, it manages to be a complex and affecting portrayal of two characters covering a long period of time without seeming rushed.

So, congratulations Ben. Speech! Speech!

And what do other people think of the winner? Any other favourites?

Here’s a stack of copies of Various Authors, photographed shortly before being sent off to the first eager readers.

Look! It’s available to buy now!

I tried several approaches to the introduction for Various Authors. I wanted to avoid the clichéd manifesto-style rant and focus instead on the quality of the stories, but I kept winding up with rather dry catalogues of the contents, essentially repeating what I’d written in the introductions to each individual story.

At the last minute, I found myself writing something a little more personal, which I hope explains a little more about what I’m doing here, and why I’m doing it. Here it is in full:

Back in the late nineties, just around the end of the big boom in alternative British music, I worked for a while as a DJ. I’d moved to a new city and hadn’t found much going on there in terms of good music, so one evening I wandered into a club and somehow talked them into letting me run their Monday nights for them. For the next year or so, I played records from bands like St Etienne, My Bloody Valentine, and half the back catalogue of the 4AD label.

The club wasn’t up to much: the beer was stale (but cheap), and they rarely replaced the bulbs in the lights, so there were times when the dance floor was lit for the entire evening by one meandering purple spotlight and an occasional burst of strobe. Both the turntables were broken and one of the CD decks skipped, so I’d put a long instrumental by Mogwai in the skipping one and use it to fill the silence while I quickly changed songs on the other deck. The crowd got used to hearing fifteen seconds of grinding guitars between each song, and occasionally losing half a Pixies chorus to a skipping disc. If there were complaints, a simple press of a button—under the decks, more or less where you’ll find the panic button in a shop—would make the complainer, the dance floor, and most of the club disappear in a cloud of raspberry-scented smoke.

On some nights the club was packed, while on others it was so empty that I’d put on a compilation CD and sit down for a drink with the regulars. It lasted for around a year, before collapsing during a particularly quiet summer. It had never been a huge commercial success (one night we managed a door take of minus fifty pee), but it had a loyal following, got people listening to new music, and sold quite a few records. A few bands formed among the regulars, and some of those went on to record albums of their own.

Then, a couple of years ago, I started a book blog where I do my best to talk about new fiction. It’s been a bit irregular, with some quiet months and some busy ones, but it’s sold a few books, introduced a few readers to new authors, and given me the opportunity to meet some interesting people.

I like to think that the club night and the blogging both came from the same place: a desire to seek out new and interesting things, the worthwhile but perhaps overlooked, and to share them with as many people as possible.

One advantage that the music had over the blogging is that it was more direct: it was a case of ‘listen to this’ rather than ‘let me tell you about this,’ sharing experiences rather than simply reporting them. Much as I enjoyed rambling to people about why they should like The Magnetic Fields, I found that it was better just to put on the CD.

It’s my preference for that directness that has led The Fiction Desk from blogging about fiction to publishing it: instead of boring you with why you should read Charles Lambert, or telling you to seek out Lynsey May’s stories, or how funny the new one from Jon Wallace is, I’m just going to show them to you.

So go and grab yourself a bottle of out-of-date beer, find somewhere comfortable to sit (not too close to the toilets, if I were you), and get ready to hear some things worth hearing.

Oh, and please bear with any odd noises you might hear: it’s not the music, just the CD player warming up.

Various Authors is available now. You can buy it from us (postage free), it’s available through bookshops in the UK, and there’s also a Kindle version. I hope you give it a try, and if you do, please come back and let me know what you think. Oh… and you can also download a pdf sample by clicking here.

It seems like only yesterday that I announced The Fiction Desk’s move into publishing. In the three months since then (and for quite a long time before then), we’ve been busy putting together our first book. With the proofs being corrected, I think it’s time to reveal all.

Our first publication, Various Authors: The Fiction Desk volume one, contains a dozen brand new stories.

I’ve tried to select a broad range of stories. While it wouldn’t make any sense to publish household names, we’ve been fortunate to get some very talented established writers on board. Regular readers of the blog will be familiar with Charles Lambert, for example. We were also fortunate enough to get a story from Danny Rhodes, the author of Asboville and Soldier Boy. Like Charles, Matthew Licht has published a short story collection with Salt; his contribution here suggests that there’s plenty more where that came from.

We’re based in the UK, and I think that there’s a greater need over here than there is in the US, where there are already a large number of literary journals. However, I’ve tried to include several stories from America, partly to provide context to the British selection, but mostly because they’re really good. As well as Matthew Licht, musician Jason Atkinson makes his fiction debut here. We’ve got a great story from Adrian Stumpp over in Utah, too. Alex Cameron is based in the UK now, but was born and brought up in Australia; I hope we’ll be able to get more stories from that part of the world in future volumes.

With the likes of the Postscripts anthology from PS Publishing and the Nightjar Press chapbooks, speculative fiction is already far better catered for than I could manage, but we’ve got our hands on a few interesting pieces that step outside the boundaries of the normal world. One of these is a new story from Patrick Whittaker, who won the 2009 British Fantasy Society Short Story Competition. I won’t flag the others up here, though: part of the fun is not knowing when things are going to go a little wonky.

I mentioned earlier that we won’t be publishing many household names, and a big reason for that is the importance of providing space for new writers to get their first publication, or to build on earlier successes. We’ve had a submissions page set up from the start, and there’s been a great response: more than five hundred submissions came in for the first volume alone. About five of the stories in this collection were requested—begged—from authors; all the rest came in as unsolicited submissions. (Please keep those submissions coming in!) Among the authors making their fiction debuts here are Jason Atkinson, Ben Lyle, and Harvey Marcus. Harvey’s story is also one of several that made me laugh out loud (LOL!) when I read it; another was Jon Wallace‘s contribution. When you read a lot, it’s easy to become jaded, to just process the words rather than really feeling them. The humour in some of these stories just cut right through that.

Here’s the full list, although the order isn’t yet finalised:

• Charles Lambert – All I want
• Lynsey May – Two Buses Away
• Matthew Licht – Dave Tough’s Luck
• Danny Rhodes – A Covering of Leaves
• Ben Lyle – Crannock House
• Ben Cheetham – Sometimes the Only Way Out is In
• Harvey Marcus – How to Fall in Love With an Air Hostess
• Jason Atkinson – Assassination Scene
• Patrick Whittaker – Celia and Harold
• Adrian Stumpp – Nativity
• Jon Wallace – Rex
• Alex Cameron – The Puzzle

So there we go. A dozen great stories from a dozen talented authors, in a bookshop near you from April 18th. For more information, see our pre-order page. You can also take out a four-volume subscription for £26.99 (a single, worldwide price).