Out of the Dark
David Gaffney
28th January 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?
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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.
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
art decades
book four
available now
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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