New from Five Leaves, Talking Green

Talking Schools, Talking Houses, Talking to Architects

... all the subjects of previous sets of lectures by Colin Ward. His interests were far wider than these concerns. Five Leaves alone has published books by him, sometimes with others, on squatting, allotments, the plotlands of the south of England, British holiday camps and anarchism. For various reasons a planned set of lectures on green issues was never published during his lifetime, but we are glad to rectify that omission now.

The twelve essays in

Talking Green cover environmental pollution, urban life, allotments, the uses of nature, land settlement, regionalism, squatting, small-holding, the green personality and the shires of Southern England. Together they provide discussion points for anyone interested in taking green politics further than climate change and recycling (important as these are). Colin Ward connects green politics and lifestyle to everyday living and working, always providing positive proposals for future living. All the essays are based on lectures given by Ward at a

variety of institutions. They are titled:

A Doomwatch for the Pollution of our Land

The Urban Predicament

The Shires of Southern Britain

Who Owns Nature? Possession and Dispossession

The Allotment Garden as a Green Affirmation

A Century of Land-settlement in Essex

Regionalist Seeds Beneath the Centralist Snow

Whose Land is it Anyway?

Small Holdings

The Green Personality

Escaping the City

Is Conservation More Than Nostalgia?

Talking Green is 160 pages, £7.99 and can be ordered from http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/talking-green/ or any good bookshop

Utopia, new from Five Leaves

One of 2012's forgotten anniversaries is that this is the year that the visitor goes to London, fifty years after the revolution and is led around by Old Hammond. The revolution in question being the one predicted in William Morris's News from Nowhere. Our collection of essays is never far away from this area - indeed Morris himself has a chapter, there is a history of News from Nowhere bookshop and we reprint the lyrics of Leon Rosselson's song about William Morris. The chapters on utopian fiction of course include a discussion of News from Nowhere and we mention the pubs named after William Morris in a revolutionary pub crawl. Utopia is dedicated to our friend Peter Preston, whose long essay on London utopian fiction is included. Peter will be missed by the adult education movement, the William Morris Society, the DH Lawrence Society and many individuals.

Utopia is the second annual themed compendium of writing by Five Leaves’ authors and friends. 240 pages, £9.99. The first compendium, Maps, received positive reviews in the Guardian and Time Out.

Copies will be in the shops soon - Housmans, News from Nowhere, London Review Bookshop especially, or order, post free, from Inpress

Contents:

Mike Marqusee - Let's Talk Utopia
Ken Worpole - Tolstoy in Essex
Gillian Darley - Moravian Graveyards
John Payne - The Putney Debates
William Morris - A Factory as it Might Be
Colin Ward - The Factory We Never Had
Mandy Vere - News from Nowhere Bookshop
John Lucas - In New Zealand
Chris Moss - In Paraguay
Deirdre O'Byrne - Woman on the Edge of Time
Paul Barker - New Lanark
Marie Louise Berneri - Utopias of the Nineteenth Century
Dennis Hardy - Catching the Bus to Paradise
Paul Summers - The Shadow of Chimneys
Pippa Hennessy - Keeping it in the Family
Leon Rosselson - The World Turned Upside Down
Ian Parks - Welsh Utopia
David Rosenberg - Freedom Without Territory
J. David Simons - Kibbutz: The Golden Era
Will Buckingham - The Trouble with Happiness
Andy Rigby - Communes Revisited
Ross Bradshaw - Down the Pub
Jeff Cloves - Stroud and Whiteway
Ian Clayton - My Grandmother's Kitchen
Peter Preston - Dreaming London
Haywire Mac - The Big Rock Candy Mountain
240 pages, £9.99, from bookshops or, post free (UK) from http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/utopia/

The Open Door book launch

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.

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

Teenage Kicks - Five Leaves/Derbyshire Libraries event

Email info@fiveleaves.co.uk if you can't read this or print it out and would like a copy!

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