The Blog

A few months ago, I wrote several posts reviewing publishers’ websites. Essentially, the same problems arose again and again: the inability to target a specific market, poor search engine optimisation, a lack of attention to the user experience, a lack of original content.

I didn’t run the series for long because the repetitiveness made it boring to write, and I’m sure it wasn’t any more fun to read. However, I looked at many more sites than I wrote about, and I came to some general conclusions that may be worth sharing. (more…)

When exactly did horror fiction become unacceptable? Is there a year, perhaps, a specific date after which anything supernatural becomes the exclusive possession of the recluse, something to occupy spotty teenage boys until they discover spotty teenage girls?

I think we’re all agreed that Frankenstein and Dracula are allowed on any bookshelf. Likewise, nobody would bat an eye if they spotted the spine of an M.R. James or the ghost stories of Charles Dickens; these snuck into the mainstream through a door that somebody left open at Christmas. H.P. Lovecraft is permissible for the sake of nostalgia, and Poe, well, he wrote poems and stories set in France, so he must be okay. Shirley Jackson’s a woman, so what she writes can’t really count as horror, and anyway, she’s a Penguin classic. Horror novels aren’t published by Penguin Classics: they’re printed by suspicious-sounding paperback imprints you’ve never heard of, they’re written by people with names like Hank Buckweather; they have titles like The Rats from the Pits of the Blood Demon and covers that feature skulls with a serpent coiling out of one eye socket and a scorpion scuttling out of the other. There will also certainly be blood… (more…)

Another year, another Booker. After last year’s fun but not particularly informative blog roundup, I thought I’d take another crack at looking at what bloggers have said so far about the Booker longlist. (For my own part, I own about five of these, but have read none of them. Yet.)

Here goes… (more…)

I’ve been working with books, and blogging about them, for a few years now, and reading them for a little longer. There’s something that I’m finding increasingly troubling: the majority of the books I purchase to read, or receive for review, shouldn’t have been published. (more…)

I’ve written in the past about the strengths and weaknesses of using the present tense in fiction. At times it can be very effective, but it’s a snappy, percussive tense, ill-suited to more ponderous prose. Ian MacKenzie‘s use of the present in City of Strangers is symptomatic of an overall discord, a clash in a novel that doesn’t seem sure whether it’s a fast psychological thriller or a Saul Bellow-style portrait of a man in his city.

The story follows a week in the life of Paul Metzger, a failing writer, still smarting from a recent divorce and a long-term breakdown in his relationship with his brother. His father, an infamous Nazi sympathiser in his youth, is dying in hospital, while Paul walks the streets of New York. When he rescues a foreign boy from a street beating, he finds himself the target of one of the assailants, who begins following him around the city. (more…)

Sum is a collection of forty vignettes describing possible afterlives, written by neuroscientist David Eagleman and collected in a compact and attractive edition by Canongate. The stories, an average of 2-3 pages each, are mostly presented in the second person, describing “your” death with irony, wit and occasional poignancy.

In the afterlife, you discover that your Creator is a species of small, dim-witted, obtuse creatures. They look vaguely human, but they are smaller and more brutish. They are singularly unitelligent. They knit their brows when they try to follow what you are saying. It will help if you speak slowly, and it sometimes helps to draw pictures. At some point their eyes will glaze over and they will nod as though they understand you, but they will have lost the thread of the conversation entirely.

from ‘Spirals’

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New from Picador, Talk of the Town is the first novel from poet Jacob Polley. It’s a coming-of-age tale set in Carlisle during the summer of 1986, and narrated in vernacular by schoolboy Chris Hearsey. His friend Arthur, never the most stable of kids, has gone missing, and Chris sets out to try and find him:

There’s nee mugshot, but I’ve got one already, me own movin clip of Arthur reachin down ter give us a hand up off the deck, the sun comin out from behind his head, dazzlin away his face. I whip the paper shut and shove it back under me bed, further back than the empty mug, behind the shoebox. I get ter me feet, wipin the sweat off me palms on me jeans. There’s nowt else fer it. I reckon I have ter gan and see Gill Ross, cus it’s her who might know where Arthur is, cus of what fat Booby said yesterday on the Arches.

I shut me bedroom door softly affter us.

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Once I’d decided to start reading a little more crime fiction, it could only be a matter of time before I encountered crime publishers Bitter Lemon Press. Their current lead title, and perhaps the best place to start, is Back to the Coast, a thriller by Dutch author Saskia Noort. (more…)

While I was examining PS Publishing’s website a few weeks ago, I decided to subscribe to their flagship quarterly publication, Postscripts. A keen reader of horror as a teenager, I’m pretty out of touch with what’s happening in the genre today, and their magazine seemed like a good way to take a refresher course. Frankly, after some rather dry days under the general fiction sun, I also needed a bit of fun. As a result, it was a slow couple of weeks waiting for my first issue to arrive. (more…)

Far North is my first encounter with Marcel Theroux (son of Paul, brother of Louis), and the author’s fourth novel. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic near future / alternative present / alternative recent past (doesn’t say; probably doesn’t matter), among a series of deserted towns that form a kind of new Wild East, where an increasingly desperate American population has colonised parts of Russia before all but dying out among snow, ice, and social collapse. (more…)

A conversation this morning with RobAroundBooks on Twitter reminded me of a forgotten but much-loved imprint, Rebel Inc. Classics. I was surprised that people hadn’t heard of them, but looking around, it does seem that they’ve been pretty effectively erased from the publishing landscape. With some of their titles fetching (or at least, asking) high prices on eBay, they probably aren’t even that easy to find in the secondhand shops anymore. (more…)

A while ago I was staying at Il Loggiato in Bagno Vignoni in Siena. It’s a lovely little place in a tiny (two dozen buildings?) spa town on the side of a hill. The accommodation was great, and the two sisters who run it put a lot of work into making a friendly, informal atmosphere; there’s a tray of fresh cakes and wine in the lounge for the guests to help themselves, and there was also a little stack of free books. Naturally, I helped myself liberally to all three, but here I’ll concern myself with the books. (more…)

In Rhyming Life and Death, the latest novel by Israeli author Amos Oz, an unnamed author walks the streets of Tel Aviv, killing time before he’s due to appear at a talk on his work in a nearby cultural centre. He dreads the coming series of questions—Why do you write? What do you think of other writers? Do you write with a pen or a computer?—all of which he’s heard before, and all of which he will answer tonight just as evasively, as vaguely, as he always has done. Sitting in a cafe, he attempts to distract himself from the upcoming event by creating a back story for the waitress who serves him. Her name is Ricky, he decides, and he goes on to imagine the story of her first love affair. (more…)

Now in their fifth year, UK-based Snowbooks describe themselves as a “feisty, award-winning independent book publisher”. Their list includes a range of general and genre fiction, along with sports, martial arts, and craft books. They’re a tech-savvy bunch, even providing these services to other publishers with their Snowangels project, so it should be interesting to see what they’ve done with their own online presence. (more…)

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been dedicating odd hours to not reading Brothers, the new novel by Chinese author Yu Hua.

It started a few months ago, round about the time that we had all that fuss about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. That book was getting a lot of coverage, and I was thinking of getting hold of a copy and reviewing it myself, but it was an awfully big book, and it was being very ably reviewed elsewhere. Still, I liked the idea of grappling with a big, translated monster, and so I was intrigued when I heard about the imminent arrival of Yu Hua’s Brothers. (more…)

A little while ago, I finally managed to visit Rome’s Porta Portese market. The main stretch is comprised of an infinite number of stalls that sell a depressingly finite range of stock; like a British high street, it seems to be the same half-dozen stores repeating themselves as far as the eye can see. The more interesting, more unique, stalls are in the side streets, where it’s more like a car boot sale. Here, on a table with perhaps a dozen English-language paperbacks, I came across a couple of books of a type I hadn’t seen before. (more…)

While book sites and blogs may be wary of turning their attention too directly towards mere television, it’s interesting how often conversation in the smoky, after hours underworld of the comments section turns to favourite series. Here, The Fiction Desk takes a look at some of the television programs most often cited and loved by the acolytes of the printed page. (more…)

I’m not usually a big fan of repackaging books—it tends to happen a lot these days, and I think the noise can distract from new fiction. However, there are exceptions: I liked the recent (and ongoing) series of Atlantic Crime Classics, and the new Magnum Collection from Penguin, published today, also seems to be a good-looking little set. (more…)

Sticking with the theme of genre fiction for this second post in a series of publisher website reviews, let’s move from newcomer Angry Robot to a more established player. PS Publishing will need no introduction to British fans of horror, science fiction, or fantasy. They’ve been printing novels and novellas for a decade now, and have their own magazine, Postscripts. They regularly pick up awards, both for individual titles and for the operation as a whole, and on the few occasions that I’ve had contact with them, they’ve also seemed like very nice people. (more…)

I don’t care much either way about the plot of The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s recently announced follow-up to The Da Vinci Code, but I bet the travel industry does. (more…)