Wednesday, 24 October 2012
Friday, 19 October 2012
Who is Mr J Smith?
I've been accused of many things in my time, including being a poet (how low can people get?) but I was rather pleased when someone accused me of being the editor of http://nottslit.blogspot.co.uk/, a regular blogspot about literature in Nottinghamshire. I'm not he, or even, when I asked Mr J Smith - the name that comes up when you email with information - she. The anonymous author likes to play it that way.
I knew it could not be me because the list of local lit websites includes a group of self-published writers. No offence and all that, but anyone who knows me...
I do have an anonymous walk on part though as I filled some gaps in the listings of local writers and have just sent a further list of novels set locally. But you could do that as well by adding "nottslit" to any local-to-here lit press releases and sending further information to fill in the gaps in their listings.
I've just suggested about a dozen novels set in Notts that are not on the list, there must be many more.
But who is he/she? I thought at first that it was the woman who runs www.nottinghambooks.co.uk but it was her who thought I ran it. I've thought of all sorts of people but for example, the list of local novels includes one, The Hosanna Man, which was pulped just after publication, decades ago, and I've only met four others locally who've heard of it. One of them is dead, one of them wouldn't know what a blog was if it came up and hit him and there are other clues indicating that it could not be either of the other two, mostly because of gaps in the list that they would know to fill.
What I can say is that Mr or Mrs J Smith is doing us all a service locally and the blog should be better known. But keep us guessing. It's more fun that way.
And keep listing things from Five Leaves Towers. We appreciate it.
I knew it could not be me because the list of local lit websites includes a group of self-published writers. No offence and all that, but anyone who knows me...
I do have an anonymous walk on part though as I filled some gaps in the listings of local writers and have just sent a further list of novels set locally. But you could do that as well by adding "nottslit" to any local-to-here lit press releases and sending further information to fill in the gaps in their listings.
I've just suggested about a dozen novels set in Notts that are not on the list, there must be many more.
But who is he/she? I thought at first that it was the woman who runs www.nottinghambooks.co.uk but it was her who thought I ran it. I've thought of all sorts of people but for example, the list of local novels includes one, The Hosanna Man, which was pulped just after publication, decades ago, and I've only met four others locally who've heard of it. One of them is dead, one of them wouldn't know what a blog was if it came up and hit him and there are other clues indicating that it could not be either of the other two, mostly because of gaps in the list that they would know to fill.
What I can say is that Mr or Mrs J Smith is doing us all a service locally and the blog should be better known. But keep us guessing. It's more fun that way.
And keep listing things from Five Leaves Towers. We appreciate it.
Five Leaves October Newsletter
Too much fancy formatting to cut and paste into here, but this is it (email us on info@fiveleaves.co.uk if you want to go on our newsletter list in future): http://tinyurl.com/5LeavesOct2012
Thursday, 18 October 2012
Tuesday, 16 October 2012
New ebook edition from Five Leaves, Zoe Fairbairns' Benefits
Having long lost touch with everyone with whom I went to school, I think I've known Zoe Fairbairns longer than anyone who is not a blood relative. I came across her as an author in 1971 when I was working in a library, one of my jobs being to daily tidy the "f"s. I have to say that she was not the most popular author in Hawick Public Library so I dusted down her early novels quite a lot. She had been taken up by a major publisher as a teenage prodigy, which can happen. She returned to fiction later, as a grown up. By then I'd got to know her, by chance, as a student activist and subsequently as editor of CND's then journal, Sanity. Zoe became a very successful novelist, her usp being an ability to write traditional novels, family sagas, airport novels and the like but with a strong feminist slant. Novels like Stand We at Last were hugely popular. Benefits was an exception, being a feminist dystopian novel set in the dying days of the twentieth century. The country was in chaos and the government had nothing better to do than attack welfare benefits for women. And women fought back using unorthodox means.
Benefits was a real feminist classic and did well for Virago in 1979. It was reprinted in a Five Leaves edition in 1998 and again did well for a few years. A spin off from the book was the alternative Xmas card giving a quote from the book - "The birth of a man who thinks he's God isn't such a rare event". Printed with text only, elegantly on card, it sold - what? - 30,000 copies over a few years for Mushroom Bookshop in Nottingham, with royalties going to the Women's Research and Resource Centre. Five Leaves later published Zoe's collection of short stories, How Do You Pronounce Nulliparous?
Now, yet again, the country is in a mess and welfare benefits are under attack. This is the right time to publish a new edition, with a new introduction by Zoe, giving the book a modern context. The print book is still available, but the ebook edition includes the new intro - and it is out now at £2.99. Available here:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Benefits-ebook/dp/B009R283ME/ref=sr_1_2_title_0_main?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1350404231&sr=1-2
Saturday, 6 October 2012
Three bookish nights in Leicester
Over the last few days I've been developing Leicester envy. I know that in Nottingham this is heresy, but there is a lot going on there. On Sunday I was the guest speaker at the Leicester Secular Hall, talking about the history of radical bookshops. It was nice to meet such well read people - some of whom even follow Five Leaves' progress - in such a historic setting, and to speak where many of my heroes, William Morris, Emma Goldman, Colin Ward and others had spoken. I suspect that one or two of the audience had heard them all, which is the problem there. A couple of literature/political regulars from Notts are the youth wing, being in their early 50s. The Secular Hall has a regular meetings programme and is in desperate need of younger people to take the Hall onwards. I'd love to have such a hall in my hometown.
But literature in Leicester, or at least those parts of it around De Montfort University, does have its young people and there were plenty of them at the reading to inaugurate Ian Parks as the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at DMU for the next year. Ian is currently editing an anthology of contemporary Yorkshire poetry for Five Leaves so I trucked along. I'd already reading his The Exile's House (Waterloo, £10) but it was nice to hear him read from the book, as well as some of his earlier love poetry and his recent translations from Cavafy. Ian's family on both sides were from mining families in Mexborough, and, to me, his narrative poems, including those written in memory of his family's involvement in the 1984/85 strike. I particularly liked his "Standards", a short poem about his father who "...sang the standards / through the long months of the strike", ending the poem Speak Softly Love, My Kind of Town. / There was snow and bitter fighting. / My father slicked his hair back, / disappeared into the night / and one by one / the earmarked pits shut down."
Back in Leicester the next day, with an older crowd again, for the launch of the film of The Dirty Thirty, a documentary about the thirty Leicestershire miners who struck out of a coalfield of 2,500. 28 years on it was still hard not to feel enraged about the Government's attack on the people of the coalfields. The highlights of the film for me were the long interviews with Michael "Benny" Pinnegar, the leader of the group (who died very recently) and Mick "Richo" Richmond, who could easily have had an alternative career as a comedian. Prominent in the film was the song of The Dirty Thirty by Alun Parry, which he wrote after reading David Bell's Five Leaves book on the group. The showing was part of the excellent Leicester Everybody's Reading book festival, which aims to take literature festivals into the whole community. After the film we managed to find the last eight members of the local labour movement who had not yet bought their copies of David Bell's book before he gave me a lift back to the station to complete a great set of Leicester visits. Or at least that was the plan. The last I saw of David as I hoofed it was him wailing "I've forgotten where I parked me fuckin' car!". I hope he got home safely.
But literature in Leicester, or at least those parts of it around De Montfort University, does have its young people and there were plenty of them at the reading to inaugurate Ian Parks as the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at DMU for the next year. Ian is currently editing an anthology of contemporary Yorkshire poetry for Five Leaves so I trucked along. I'd already reading his The Exile's House (Waterloo, £10) but it was nice to hear him read from the book, as well as some of his earlier love poetry and his recent translations from Cavafy. Ian's family on both sides were from mining families in Mexborough, and, to me, his narrative poems, including those written in memory of his family's involvement in the 1984/85 strike. I particularly liked his "Standards", a short poem about his father who "...sang the standards / through the long months of the strike", ending the poem Speak Softly Love, My Kind of Town. / There was snow and bitter fighting. / My father slicked his hair back, / disappeared into the night / and one by one / the earmarked pits shut down."
Back in Leicester the next day, with an older crowd again, for the launch of the film of The Dirty Thirty, a documentary about the thirty Leicestershire miners who struck out of a coalfield of 2,500. 28 years on it was still hard not to feel enraged about the Government's attack on the people of the coalfields. The highlights of the film for me were the long interviews with Michael "Benny" Pinnegar, the leader of the group (who died very recently) and Mick "Richo" Richmond, who could easily have had an alternative career as a comedian. Prominent in the film was the song of The Dirty Thirty by Alun Parry, which he wrote after reading David Bell's Five Leaves book on the group. The showing was part of the excellent Leicester Everybody's Reading book festival, which aims to take literature festivals into the whole community. After the film we managed to find the last eight members of the local labour movement who had not yet bought their copies of David Bell's book before he gave me a lift back to the station to complete a great set of Leicester visits. Or at least that was the plan. The last I saw of David as I hoofed it was him wailing "I've forgotten where I parked me fuckin' car!". I hope he got home safely.
Monday, 1 October 2012
Sheffield Independent Publishers' Book Fair
Do drop by our stall if you are near Sheffield on 3rd November. There are also readings from our writers John Lucas, David Belbin and Danuta Reah while Liz Cashdan is taking part in a panel discussion. Not that we're trying to take over or anything.
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