Reading 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.

We’ve just finished the voting for the latest Fiction Desk Writer’s Award, which covers the stories in All These Little Worlds. I’ve not written much about the award before, but it’s quite an important part of what we do.

The Fiction Desk Writer’s Award is a cash prize for the best story in each volume, and it’s judged by the contributors themselves. The idea is that the stories are judged by the people who write them; as editor, even I don’t have a vote.

The amount of the prize and the exact voting method will vary from time to time, as we fine-tune it: for the first two volumes, it’s been a special prize of £200, and each contributor has had two votes (the second to be used in case of a tie).

Ben Lyle won the award earlier this year for his story ‘Crannock House’ in Various Authors, in a very close competition: we eventually had to bring in John Self from The Asylum to break the tie.

I’ll be announcing the winner for All These Little Worlds at the end of next week. The news will be here on the blog, and in our newsletter.

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…)

Like many people, I first noticed Roast Books when they published A.C. Tillyer’s collection of short stories, An A-Z of Possible Worlds. It was a highly entertaining read, but also an exciting piece of publishing: the elaborate production, involving a boxed set of 26 booklets, was both eye-catching and perfectly suited to the material.

While An A-Z… might be Roast Books’ most elaborate volume, it’s be no means the only one: they started with a series of paperback novellas and short story collections called Great Little Reads, and more recent publications include Nik Perring’s collection of flash fiction, Not So Perfect. Their most recent book is Dogsbodies and Scumsters, a quirky collection of short stories by Alan McCormick with illustrations by Jonny Voss. Here’s the trailer:

With such a diverse and interesting selection of publications, I decided it was time to find out more about Roast Books and their plans, so I got in touch with their publisher Faye Dayan…

For a young publishing house with relatively few titles, you’ve managed to create a wonderfully diverse range: from the Great Little Reads with their textured covers, to the simple square of Nik Perring’s book, through to the extravagant A-Z of Possible Worlds, I’m not sure that you’ve tackled any two projects in the same way. What made you decide to take this approach?

Each book of short fiction Roast Books has published has deserved its own approach because we try to match form to content. I think it’s important that the shape and character of a book can reflect and relate to the stories inside.

Will you be revisiting the Great Little Reads series?

The novella is such a great genre, and often overlooked I think, so I would love to revisit the Great Little Reads series, although for the moment Roast Books is focused on short story collections.

Is it challenging to create a strong identity for Roast Books when you’re using a variety of formats? As opposed to, say, Peirene Press, who have one very distinct look to their titles.

You are right, this presents a challenge in creating an image for Roastbooks, but it is the philosophy of production, rather than the production itself which is consistent across all our books. The creative process of working with an author and collaborating on the design is very rewarding and something I would like to believe that our readers acknowledge and appreciate.

I’m sure they do. Your list is very focussed on short stories and novellas—a focus I can strongly identify with! I can see how short stories would be a logical choice for an experimental publisher like Roast Books, because the reading experience of shorter works can be more flexible than that of longer novels, where the book perhaps needs more to disappear more behind the writing. What’s the attraction for you in publishing short stories?

The genre of short stories is extensive, and there are fewer accepted publishing traditions associated with them. So firstly, as you said, as a new publisher, it gives more flexibility to experiment. Secondly many short stories are appreciated as they provide light bites of entertainment and stimulation, and the book format can be something which enhances this rather than detracts from it.

Do you see Roast Books moving into ebook publishing, or would you prefer to focus on the physical reading experience?

It’s interesting because the physical aspect of the book is intrinsic to Roast Books, so we will not release digital books without their physical counterpart. Having said that, we are developing an exciting little e-project which will give users the ability to self publish and distribute.

That’s interesting. More traditional publishers seem to be getting involved with self-publishing projects these days. It used to be very much a no-no, causing issues with credibility and conflicts of interest, but that certainly seems to be changing. How do you plan to reconcile the two very different types of publishing with Roast Books?

I agree it is changing. The type of self publishing where publishers put out a physical book in return for a hefty fee isn’t the only model any more. With ebooks, authors can create and distribute their own book online, in a speedy and cheap process, and this is something which part of our e-project will facilitate. Aspiring authors can bring their ebooks to the attention not just of potential readers but also potential publishers. There won’t necessarily be any overlap between this and our physical books at all.

How have you found the experience of entering the publishing industry? Do you think it’s a receptive world for new independents? Have you had any particular frustrations or pleasant surprises?

As you know things are changing very rapidly in the book industry and there is a lot of speculation about where it’s headed. But i have been certainly met some people within the industry who are extremely supportive and genuinely want new independents to succeed. It’s undoubtably tough, but you just have to keep going and see what’s around the next corner. We have just sold the film rights to My Soviet Kicthen by Amy Spurling, to Tailormade productions, which was an unexpected but welcome development.

What kind of team do you have? Do you work with a lot of people, or are you largely self-sufficient?

I work with the same designer, editor and publicist on each book, so its a very small operation, but I think this has its benefits! We work quickly, and it’s a lot of fun.

Are there any other emerging independent publishers that you particularly admire?

lol The Fiction Desk! Various Authors introduces a really interesting spectrum of new talent and I’m really enjoying it.

Thank you! I wasn’t fishing, I promise… Finally, what’s next for Roast Books?

We have some great projects planned for 2012, all collections of short stories, and also the development of our self publishing platform.

Find out more about Roast Books at their website, www.roastbooks.org.

An email newsletter just arrived from Charles at CB Editions, containing full details of the poetry book fair that he’s been planning.

It’s on Saturday, 24th September, from 10am – 5pm. There are readings through the day, and the fair is being opened at 11am by Michael Horovitz.

Publishers in attendance will be: Anvil, Arc, Carcanet, CBe, Donut, Egg Box, Enitharmon, flipped eye, HappenStance, if p then q, Nine Arches, Rack Press, Reality Street, Salt, Shearsman, Sidekick, Waterloo, Ward Wood, Waywiser, and zimZalla.

They’re not getting any external funding, so if you like the sound of this and you’re in London, it’s worth going along and showing support.

Here’s the flier:

The poetry book fair is part of a project CB Editions is running called ‘Book Now’. You’ll find more information on the CBe site, here.

The world of independent publishing, for all its challenges and controversies, is full of fascinating, energetic, and creative people. New publishers are appearing all the time, looking for fresh ways to connect readers with great writing. Over the next few months, we’ll be exploring some of this innovation by featuring a series of interviews with other independent publishers. First up is Meike Ziervogel (photo right) from Peirene Press.

Peirene launched their first titles in 2010. They publish translated novellas, “that can be read in the same time it takes to watch a DVD.” We reviewed one of their titles, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, last year.

I’m sure many of this blog’s readers are already familiar with Peirene, but for those that aren’t, would you like to start by telling me a little about your latest title, Tomorrow Pamplona?

Tomorrow Pamplona by Dutch author Jan van Mersbergen is a road movie in book form. It tells the story of two men, a family man and a boxer, who take a car journey from Amsterdam to Pamplona where they join in the bull run. It’s a book about men, their aggression and desire for freedom on the one hand, and their need for intimacy on the other.

Was it really only last year that Peirene published its first title? You’ve done a great job of establishing Peirene in a relatively short time. Part of that I think is down to the distinctive branding: the cream paperbacks with the cropped images and flaps. Could you tell me a little about how you settled on that design?

Thank you for the compliment. From the start I knew that I wanted to go for a strong branding. I initially had a different designer and design, but that was before the first book was printed. I wasn’t happy with it. Then I found Sacha Davison-Lunt, Peirene’s current designer. She is great and we work well together because she understands to combine quality and elegance with individuality.

I think it would make me nervous to have one consistent design like that: What if I got bored of it? What if people stopped responding? Do you have any plans to publish in any other formats, or can you imagine doing so? I’m thinking of perhaps a hardback edition of a special title, as Hesperus have done a couple of times, or a radically different one-off cover design—say, as CB Editions did, breaking their distinctive typographic cover style for Knight Crew and Marjorie Ann Watts’s book.

Our design is very flexible. Next year will be Peirene’s Year of the Small Epic, short books with over 30 chapters each. Although the design will still be recognizably “Peirene”, the covers will reflect the annual theme.

Do you have any plans to release ebook editions of your titles?

Yes, we have just signed a contract with Faber Factory who will do the ebook distribution for us.

That’s interesting. What made you decide to work with another publisher on the ebooks?

About 60 publishers have already signed up with Faber Factory. They will do the e-book distribution for us. Since they are experts in that field, it’s much better that they do it for us rather than we trying to do it all by ourselves.

When do you expect to release the first ebook titles?

Very soon.

And in terms of content, can you see Peirene every publishing a book of short stories, or a longer novel, or even a book written originally in English?

Peirene No 6, Maybe This Time by Austrian Alois Hotschnig, which will be published in September, is a collection of short-stories. As for an English novella? If a well-known English language author has a novella in his or her drawer, I’d be delighted to have a look.

Speaking of translation, one thing that worries me as a publisher about translated fiction is in the editorial side, the fact that one loses the immediacy of being able to work directly with the author, because effectively, however good the translation, the author and the publisher are always looking at different texts. This often wouldn’t apply to you, as I know you’re multi-lingual, but is that lack of an immediate connection ever an issue?

No, I wouldn’t say that. The original book and the translation are of course two different texts. I love texts. What is important to me is to present the English reader with a text that is true to the essence of the original but at the same time is a perfect English text, “as if it were written in English”, without of course changing names, street names etc.

Aside from the publishing, you also run a regular Salon. Could you tell me a little more about these events? Would you say they have played a big part in Peirene’s success to date? Do you have more plans for different types of event, perhaps touring the salon around the country?

The Peirene Salon is our flagship event. They take place in my own house, where I invite up to 50 people – readers, book lovers, critics, colleagues. Some people I know, others I have never met before. These Salons very much represent what Peirene stands for – to build a cohesive community of booklovers and readers. The evenings don’t present boring readings but are parties with performances, conversation, dinner and wine. In fact the Salons are now funded by The Wine Society and so the hospitality is always excellent. We are always booked up with a waiting list in place. The majority of the guests leave around 11pm but some stay on until 2 or 3 in the morning, drinking and talking. It’s wonderful. We also run regular Coffee Mornings in a local cafe. There we reach out to a different readership. Even children are welcome. And then we also have an event series called Peirene Experience where we present books in unusual places and different ways. For example, in March we held an event with the actor Jack Ellis and our German author Matthias Politycki in a bookshelf designer shop. The evening was a huge success.

Overall, how have you found the experience of entering the publishing industry? Any particular frustrations (naming no names, of course!) or pleasant surprises?

It’s an incredibly exciting journey because the book market is changing so fast and no one yet knows where it will take us. And to be right in the middle of this is a huge privilege.

And finally, just so that I’m absolutely certain, how exactly does one pronounce “Peirene”?

Watch the movie below and the mystery will be revealed…

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?

This brief quote from Somerset Maugham will come in handy if you’re the kind of person (like me) who can’t be bothered to read the latest Big Novel:

I have learnt by experience that when a book makes a sensation it is just as well to wait a year before you read it. It is astonishing how many books then you need not read at all.

It’s from the opening paragraphs of his story The Voice of the Turtle, in volume one of the Collected Short Stories.

Here’s another interesting publishing project that I’ve come across recently.

Broadsheet Stories print a monthly broadsheet—a single short story on one side of A3 paper—and distribute them to a selection of cafes and bookshops, mostly in south-west England, where customers are free to read them on the spot or take them home. (The photo above was taken in the Martello Bookshop in Rye.) Each venue begins with the first story and moves on one month at a time, meaning that there will be a different story available to read depending on where you are.

The stories are all necessarily short, coming in at just under 2000 words. Since starting in 2009, they’ve printed stories from a wide range of authors, including our own Matthew Licht.

Most of the stories can also be downloaded from the Broadsheet Stories website, but I think that takes away the fun of it: if you’re in the right part of the country, drop by one of the venues (listed here) and see which story they’ve got available this month.

I’ve been meaning to post something about Slightly Foxed for a while now, but something kept getting in the way. Since getting Various Authors off to the printers, I’ve had a little more time, and finally found the chance to open their Spring 2011 issue, no. 29.

Literary publications can approach their content in one of two ways: they can provide a range of essays, fiction, and poetry (Stinging Fly, The Paris Review, Granta etc.), or they can specialise, aiming to do one thing well. For The Fiction Desk’s anthology series, I decided to focus only on short stories. On the other hand, Slightly Foxed prints nothing but concise, personal essays about old books, both classics and forgotten gems.

Volume 29 contains 17 essays on titles as diverse as The Phantom Tollbooth and On The Origin of Species. They’re very well crafted, personal essays, of the sort that we encounter (and in my case, write) all too rarely on book blogs. The editors actually describe the content very well on their own website:

Slightly Foxed is more like a bookish friend, really, than a literary periodical. Companionable and unstuffy, each quarter it offers 96 pages of personal recommendations for books of lasting interest, old and new. It’s an eclectic mix, covering all the main categories of fiction and non-fiction, and our contributors are an eclectic bunch too. Some of them are names you’ll have heard of, some not, but they all write thoughtfully, elegantly and entertainingly.

The cumulative effect is that of visiting the best kind of used book shop, where you spend all day hanging around, talking to everybody that comes in and leaving with an armful of books. In fact, the publishers of Slightly Foxed do also have a bookshop, Foxed Books. I was in there once, a long time before I’d read the quarterly, and liked it very much.

The books themselves are beautifully produced, with very nice paper used throughout: the feel of each edition is more than enough to justify the relatively high price tag (a four-volume subscription costs £36). As you can see from the picture above, they also put a great deal of care and thought into the packaging.

As well as the quarterly, there’s a series of attractive limited edition reprints of lost or forgotten works, known as Slightly Foxed Editions.

All in all, Slightly Foxed is a must-read for literature lovers. Try it at least once, or you’ll never know what you’re missing out on.

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.

Regular readers of this blog might remember my review of Sabra Zoo, Mischa Hiller‘s excellent debut novel based around the 1982 massacre in Sabra Camp. I concluded that review by saying how much I was looking forward to Hiller’s next book.

Well, his next book is here now, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Shake Off is set in 1989 and is narrated by Michel, a young PLO agent living undercover in London as a student. Sabra rears its head here, too: Michel is both a victim and a creation of that event, which claimed the lives of his family and led to his adoption by a PLO operative who arranged his education and later his training in espionage. Now he lives alone in a bedsit, addicted to painkillers and shunning human contact. His life, from what he does to how he lives, has essentially become a complex coping mechanism for his past. The enforced solitude and paranoia of his work create a noise that blocks out the past from his days in the same way the codeine gets him through the nights:

So you have to be on continual alert: every public place is a potential meeting place; every alley or public toilet could be a dead-letter drop; every street, store and restaurant needs to be assessed for its counter-surveillance potential. You need to be constantly on the look-out for places to cache money and documents. Everyday objects must be considered potential concealers of microphones or cameras. Every person you meet could either be an agent wanting to get close or a possible recruit to the cause. Every woman that talks to you wants to trap you with the promise of sex. Every postcard has a hidden meaning. Everybody behind you could be following you, and it is your job to shake them off.

But while Michel is good at what he does—and we get plenty of insights into the tricks of his trade—he is still an unwitting pawn, and the comparison that kept coming to mind was Alfred Hitchcock. Michel is very much a Hitchcock innocent, drawn into a murky underworld that he shouldn’t have anything to do with—even if that drawing-in has taken place years before the story is set. The story too has a Hitchcockian feel to it: the tense but witty set-pieces involving counter-espionage in Foyle’s on the Charing Cross Road, or the move from the London of the opening chapters to a climax set in the wilds of Scotland. The novel as a whole feels like one of Hitchcock’s better films, and I doubt that the cinematic appeal of the book is entirely coincidental. Hiller certainly knows his cinema—his screenplay for Sabra Zoo won the European Independent Film Festival script competition.

That said, it doesn’t do this book justice to simply praise it as a cinematic book, or an embryonic movie. The writing is strong and confident, even when the narrator is not: Michel and his world are vividly evoked. Hiller is, I think, an excellent writer. Sabra Zoo went down well, and Shake Off is getting positive reviews absolutely everywhere. Well-written enough to please the serious reader, and fast-paced and engaging enough for the beach (if summer ever comes), Shake Off deserves to do very well.

Books aren’t always the most likely material for computer game adaptations. Classic (and public domain) characters sometimes make it across, like Dracula or Sherlock Holmes, but more direct book adaptations tend to be limited to speculative fiction titles: I remember playing The Hobbit on my rubber-keyed ZX Spectrum, and there have been a series of games based on Lord of the Rings and the Discworld series. Games like Blade Runner probably owe more to the film adaptations than to the source material.

A tongue-in-cheek exception to the rule is this new video game adaptation of The Great Gatsby, produced in the style of an old-school NES platformer. Level one involves battling your way through Gatsby’s party, picking off waiters and flappers with your incredible boomerang hat; level two is a train chase sequence climaxing in a battle with the disembodied eyes of Dr. T. J. Eckleburg (see right). I can’t tell you what happens after that, because Eckleburg got me (see right again).

The Great Gatsby game is a free-to-play Flash game: go over to greatgatsbygame.com and give it a try. You’ll probably do better than I did.

US-based independent Madras Press publish small books, containing one or more short stories, and donate the proceeds to charities nominated by their authors. The books themselves are very nicely done, attractive little square paperbacks. The first titles were released just before Christmas in 2009, and over the recent holidays they published their second series, which includes a new story from Andrew Kaufman.

Andrew Kaufman is a McSweeney’s contributor, and has two novels published in the UK by Telegram: All My Friends are Superheroes and The Waterproof Bible. He has a whimsical style, perhaps reminiscent of somebody like a Richard Brautigan, which probably works better in small doses like this than it does in his more extended work. Maybe for that reason, I enjoyed The Tiny Wife more than anything else of his that I’ve read. It begins with a bank robbery, in which the thief takes one item of sentimental value from everybody present. As a result of these losses, (more…)

I don’t usually cover nonfiction here on the site, unless there’s a strong connection to the world of storytelling. Titanic Thompson: the Man Who Bet on Everything both is and isn’t an exception to that rule.

Titanic Thompson, born Alvin Thomas, grew up in the early years of the last century, and became known as one of the greatest confidence tricksters of the era. He made millions of dollars through elaborate cons, and by hustling pool, poker and golf.

The path he cut through twentieth century America also brought him into contact with some of the period’s most famous and notorious characters: he was in on the poker game that led to the death of Arnold Rothstein, and he tricked $500 out of Al Capone over a bet regarding how far he could throw a lemon. He became the basis for the character of Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls. He also found time to get married five times, and to kill five people. (more…)

From the creators of Smoke: A London Peculiar, comes this new board game, which is possibly the first board game with a literary magazine theme.

The players in Soho! each take on the role of editor of a literary magazine, and must make their way around the board (representing Soho), collecting pieces of prose from half a dozen recalcitrant, boozing writers. Obstacles and aids come in the form of plastic counters and two decks of playing cards – one representing Soho’s pubs, the other a ‘Bloody Writers!’ deck. The editors can attempt to reach the writers by foot, by taxi, or by Boris Bike. The winner is the first editor to collect all six pieces of prose, thus completing their magazine.

‘Soho’ is being launched on Wednesday 8th December at the Blue Posts, 22 Berwick Street, in Soho, which will presumably lead to Jumanji-like levels of boardgame-themed meta-reality.

As I immerse myself ever more deeply in the world of the short story, I’m discovering a near endless range of great publishers and publishing projects. As well as magazines and anthologies, I’ve seen some terrific chapbooks. I’m hoping to cover a wide selection of these over the coming months, but let’s start with Nightjar Press.

Nightjar Press is run by Nicholas Royle, himself author of half a dozen books and editor of several anthologies – including Best British Short Stories, a new upcoming annual anthology from Salt. They publish dark, disquieting stories, each of which examines general themes through a paranormal lens: a chill for now, a thought for later. (more…)

Gerard Woodward started out as a poet, and his prose career began a decade ago with a well received trilogy – August, I’ll Go to Bed at Noon, and A Curious Earth. I managed to watch those books go by without actually picking any of them up; the publication of Nourishment, his new standalone novel, seemed like a good opportunity to start catching up.

Nourishment opens in the early days of the Second World War, in the London household of Tory Pace. Everything has changed with the advent of war: her husband Donald has been called up, the children have been packed off to the countryside, and her mother has come to live with her, ‘possessed of an unshakeable belief that her daughter, and London generally, needed her.’

Before long, the mother has set the tone of the novel by bringing home a piece of mystery meat from the remains of a bombed-out butcher’s shop – possibly a pork joint, probably a chunk of the bombed-out butcher. Then Tory receives a letter from Donald, who has become a prisoner of war. The letter contains scraps of general news, and an urgent request for dirty letters from his wife: ‘I mean really filthy, full of all the dirtiest words and deeds you can think of… Love to your ma, Donald.’ (more…)

I’m delighted to announce some big news from The Fiction Desk.

We’re relaunching as a publisher, with a list dedicated to promoting new fiction.

Our first project is a quarterly anthology of new short stories, featuring a wide range of stories from both new and established writers. We’re excited – this series is going to be a great platform for a variety of writers, and a great way for readers to get a regular fix of quality short fiction.

Subscriptions are available now, and more details of the first volume, Various Authors, will follow over the next few weeks. (For now, there’s the cover on the right.)

We’ll also be increasing new content here on the blog, reviewing new titles from other publishers, and sharing news from across the book trade.

If you’d like us to keep you updated with our plans, sign up for our newsletter here.