Waiting for the Gift:
Stories Inspired by Low
Edited by Richard V. Hirst
Low, David Bowie’s 1977 album, stands as both his creative apex and an album which pushed popular music to its outer limits.
The eleven short stories in Waiting for the Gift, each of which takes a song on the album as its title and inspiration, provide a collective response from some of the best contemporary writers of fiction.
Featuring original work from Dima Alzayat, Anne Billson, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, Jen Calleja, Ruby Cowling, Wendy Erskine, Keeley Forsyth, David Hayden, Zoë McLean, Adam Marek, Preti Taneja, Melissa Wan and Hugo Wilcken.
Waiting for the Gift maps out the otherworldly labyrinth that is Low, moving through tales of madness and the abyss, but also of futuristic fantasia and intrepid inner exploration.
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5th May 2022
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Out of the Dark
David Gaffney
17th February 2022
Available to pre-order now...
Daniel Quinn has rented a flat at the top of a high-rise block in Birmingham where he watches the same video over and over again, an old British film noir called Out of the Dark. This film holds some important information for him, something which will help him deal with recent tragic events in his life. But what is he looking for in this corny black and white B-flick?
Out of the Dark is an unsettling story of grief, obsession and duplicity. It is also about film noir itself, and as Daniel dissects the recurring motifs of his favourite film genre he reveals more about himself than he does about the movie. The edges of the film and real life begin to blur. Is Daniel being pulled into a similar whirlpool of deceit, corruption and violence?
'A twisted and darkly funny neo-noir that somehow channels the restless spirits of both David Lynch and Shane Meadows while remaining intensely literary. In Out of the Dark David Gaffney has produced a book with real propulsive energy, one that produces surprises on nearly every page.' Stephen May, Costa Prize-shortlisted author of Life! Death! Prizes!
'Out of the Dark is an ingenious, idiosyncratic and unnerving noir, in which Ballard meets Jim Thomson meets Mike Leigh in a high-rise block next to a motorway in the Black Country.' Luke Brown, editor, critic, and author of novels My Biggest Lie and Theft.
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All you need is dynamite
Acid, the Angry Brigade, and the End of the Sixties
Dave Haslam
publication Date 26th August
In ‘All You Need Is Dynamite’, the latest in his Art Decades series of small format, limited edition books, Dave Haslam explores the fading of Sixties dreams of peace and love, and the emergence of urban terrorist groups, particularly a cell known as the Angry Brigade who carried out dozens of bomb attacks in Britain.
Haslam tracks the political campaigns, the police repression, and the insane times, from underground music venues, via May ’68 in Paris, to the story of Angry Brigade members living in Manchester for several months in 1971 and contributing to the underground paper Mole Express (a bible for local acid-freaks, and fans of the Edgar Broughton Band and the Weather Underground).
Picking his way through forgotten streets and demolished clubs, and the pages of underground newspapers, Haslam uncovers a heady mix of left-wing politics, psychedelic music, police raids and political violence.
BETWEEN TONGUES
PAUL MCQUADE
Publication Date 16th AUGUST
Where does one language end and another begin? What happens to those people who find themselves not simply between languages but in states of transformation and translation? How do we speak, act, and live in these spaces where everything seems at once both promised and impossible?
Paul McQuade’s debut short story collection moves into this space between tongues – a play on the Scottish Gaelic word for translation, eadar-theangachadh. These stories span modern myth and the surreal, Europe, Asia, and North America, and take language and technology to their limit to map those strange places where people without voices find themselves.
"Equally at home with the weird and the everyday, McQuade is a singular talent worth seeking out."
The Herald
London Gothic
Publication Date 10th November
available now
In his fourth short story collection, an exploration of the dark side of modern London, Nicholas Royle redefines urban Gothic for the twenty-first century. Fifteen stories, dating from 2000 to the present day and including seven brand-new pieces, demonstrate Royle’s range of styles and techniques. Often writing against a background of film, art or literature, he unearths unease in the streets of Shepherd’s Bush, Hackney and South Tottenham, and creates uncanny effects with innovative, experimental forms.
London Gothic is the first in a projected series of city-based collections by Royle. Forthcoming volumes are devoted to Manchester and Paris.
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My Second Home: Sylvia Plath in Paris, 1956
Dave Haslam
Sylvia Plath was in Paris during Easter 1956, alone in a hotel near
Notre Dame. She’d grown to love the city after spending Christmas there
with Richard Sassoon and she’d hoped he‘d be with her for Easter too,
but he hadn’t answered her letters. She’d met Ted Hughes a month
earlier; Ted was also in her head, and within ten weeks they’d be
married.
In the fourth book in his Art Decades series, Dave Haslam describes
this key period in Sylvia Plath’s life. We discover how she filled
those Paris days, including having dinner with an Italian communist,
embracing the idea of drunken afternoon sex with a friend of a friend, sketching in the park, and lying on her yellow bed in an attic room listening to the sound of the Paris rain as she considered decisions and future plans:
in her phrase, ‘the fatal dance’ of choices and alternatives.
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