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…)

White’s Books first appeared a couple of years ago, when they launched a series of attractive hardcover classics with decorated cloth. It’s a project run under the art direction of David Pearson, an ex-Penguin designer who worked on projects like the Great Ideas series, and the cheap green Popular Classics.

The latest from White’s is a new series of Pocket Classics. (more…)

A few months ago, I asked Twitter users to recommend their favourite literary magazines. The response was pretty impressive, and not least from the magazines themselves, many of whom are active on Twitter. I wound up with a list of a good dozen publications to explore, and first among these was Dublin-based The Stinging Fly, a triannual publication of new writing: poems, fiction, essays, reviews.

As well as the magazine, there’s The Stinging Fly Press, which publishes novels and anthologies. Among other titles, they’ve published Kevin Barry’s There are Little Kingdoms, and Fighting Tuesdays, a collection of stories by fourth year students from Larkin Community College.

Their latest publication is Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails, an anthology of new short stories edited by Philip Ó Ceallaigh. (more…)

People seem to be waking up to the fact that too much time spent browsing the web can damage our ability to concentrate on a single subject for extended periods.

Nicholas Carr’s new book, The Shallows, has been raising questions about the way Internet use (at work as well as at home) may be rewiring our brains, while over in the Guardian, Charlie Brooker wrote a piece entitled Google Instant is Trying to Kill Me, in which he discussed the ways that evolving technology has been chipping away at his attention span. He also tries something called The Pomodoro Technique, a special system whereby, through the use of a kitchen timer, we can train our minds to concentrate on a single subject for up to 25 minutes at a time!

What better time, then, to pick up the latest title from Peirene Press, Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman. Oh, it’s short, like all Peirene’s books. It’s just 125 pages, which should present no challenge to even the most hyperlink-addled brain. Just 125 pages. Just a single, 125 page sentence. (more…)

Each year I try to do a rundown of the Booker longlist according to the book blogs. (Here’s 2008 & 2009.) I’m running a little late this year – don’t look at me like that, I’ve been busy – so let’s get straight to the Booker shortlist, 2010:

Parrot and Olivier in America Peter Carey

Peter Carey’s first Booker winner, Oscar and Lucinda casts a shadow over several of the reviews of his new book. Jackie at Vulpes Libris can’t help noticing that one of the characters shares Oscar’s dishevelled red hair, while Trevor at The Mookse and the Gripes finds himself revisiting Carey for the first time since reading that book (having skipped Carey’s other Booker winner, The True History of the Kelly Gang).

Kevin from Canada read this one with some reluctance, not being a huge Carey fan, or being familiar with Alexis de Toquevillle, whose journey to the USA inspired the book:

Carey is a competent and talented writer and he carefully and deliberately unfolds that story in a reader-friendly fashion. He has obviously researched his material thoroughly — too thoroughly for this reader, because long sections of the book are taken up with explanations of the obvious that left me wanting only for them to end. While I appreciate the author’s determination to chronicle the “American” story, he does not have much new to add — his respect for the obvious history is so great that it comes to dominate the book

See Kevin’s full review, and the subsequent discussion in the comments, here.

Room Emma Donoghue

John Self kicked off his review on The Asylum by measuring it against his initial hopes…

Room has an intriguing premise: it’s narrated by a five-year-old boy who lives in a room twelve feet square and doesn’t know the outside world exists. This immediately set my reading glands salivating: I imagined an allegorical, philosophical novel, a European-style confection that provided an analysis of all our lives by an extrapolation to the extreme, something like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. So my disappointment with Room is partly unreasonable, denouncing it for not being a different book entirely.

… before coming to the conclusion that ‘it’s clear that Room aims at the heart rather than the head, and for many people the emotional heft of the story will be enough to recommend it.’

If Room didn’t find its natural reader in John, it fared better with Jackie at Farm Lane Books, (more…)

You probably think that we survived the Millennium Bug. Perhaps you’ve even stopped nervously looking at the VCR’s clock when it starts blinking 00:00, you no longer think twice before booking flights over New Year’s Eve, or wonder whether there really are computer chips inside milk cartons.

Well, maybe you’re right. But step into the world of Things We Didn’t See Coming, the debut novel by Steven Amsterdam, and you’ll wish we’d all stuck with the abacus.

The nine or so chapters (which fill just under 200 pages), follow a single, unnamed narrator over roughly thirty post-apocalyptic years, taking him from childhood, just before the catastrophe, to an accelerated old age. (more…)

Last year, my review of Charles Lambert‘s debut novel Little Monsters included a hypothetical conversation with the author over a plate of pasta. A few months later, we had exactly that. The conversation resulted in a lengthy and (I hope) very interesting interview, in which we discussed the strange political situation in Rome, and Lambert also went into great detail about his new novel, Any Human Face.

In a sense, then, I’ve scuppered myself, because it’s difficult for me to write a review that would be half as interesting as Lambert was that day. So if you’re interested in finding out more about the background to Any Human Face, I’d suggest that you start with the Charles Lambert interview. (more…)

Telegram, the literary fiction imprint from Middle-East non-fiction specialists Saqi books, is an imprint that I’ve been meaning to check out for a while now. Their list looks interesting, and their titles—All My Friends are Superheroes, Metropole, etc—seem to get quite a bit of attention.

I first heard of them last year on Twitter (where I am @thefictiondesk, and they are @Saqibooks), at a time when they were justifiably pleased with themselves for having won the 2009 Diversity in Literature Award, and by the beginning of 2010, I even managed to have one of their catalogues in hand—I got all the way to page 3 before finding something I wanted to read. (more…)

< view newer posts or view older posts >