Bookish Gift Ideas...

So, I've been immensely honoured over the past few years to be asked to contribute an endorsement to a range of wonderful books. I take the task of blurbing very seriously, it takes me a long time, for me a blurb is almost a story in itself, and as I've seen from the amazing  blurbs I was lucky enough to get, they can really give a great impression of what is in the book. So, if you're looking for presents to buy this festive season, here are all the books - in no particular order - that I've blurbed, with my blurbs - I highly recommend them all!

Dot Dash by Jon Pinnock

In these wonderful short, very short and very very short stories, Jonathan Pinnock takes aim at all the foibles and vanities we think we succeed in hiding. Not content to just pull back the curtain, Pinnock sets fire to it and chuckles as it blazes. Yet he also executes something of a conjuring trick, making us laugh, but also making us feel, think. Like Nana, whose granddaughter recreates Cairo in her bedroom for her before she dies, we fabricate our own reality: we see and hear what we want and ignore what we don't. Dot Dash is sending us a message, and yes, it may be through yellow plastic ducks, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't listen. 

Beneath the Liquid Skin by Berit Ellingsen

Berit Ellingsen is no ordinary wordsmith but a weaver of silken tapestories, lush and burning with both ancient ache and postmodern playfulness. Mixing myth and astronomy, desire and other appetites, and dancing on the thread that slips between poetry and prose, Ellingsen stitches every word in perfect service to her utterly beautiful and dreamlike stories.

The Baghdad Fixer by Ilene Prusher

A journalist's fixer is a go-between in so many senses: linguistic, cultural. The fixer straddles borders and boundaries, helping each try to communicate with the Other. Ilene Prusher conjurs this so beautifully in her stunning, thrilling debut, as Nabil, an Iraqi English teacher with a poetic soul, is drawn into the unfamiliar, learning as much about his own country and people as about the world in which Samarra, the American journalist who has hired him, moves so easily. A unique novel, The Baghdad Fixer's compelling plot is combined with poignant and difficult insights into the life and tragedies of ordinary Iraqis during the war. This is not just a wonderful read, it is an important book for helping us, too, to begin to understand the Other.

Fakakt: Melissa Morris and The Meaning of Sex by Jasmine Schwartz

I love Melissa Morris. The most unlikely heroine of a murder mystery, she's insecure, worried about her failing love life, her job prospects and her fashion sense. Yet when, on a trip to Rome in pursuit of errant boyfriend Colin, she is wrongfully arrested for murder, does she sit in a cell, weeping? She does not. She promptly escapes to track down the real murderer and clear her name. In a city she's not familiar with and a language she doesn't speak. That's more than plucky, and it makes for the unputdownable story of an amateur detective who could be any one of us, stumbling around atmospheric Italian streets trying to piece the plot together. I dare you not to fall in love with Jasmine Schwartz's Melissa Morris too. She may believe she's "fakakt" but I think she's fabulous!

Enough by Valerie O'Riordan

Valerie O'Riordan puts to shame the puffed-up and the oversized with her beautiful, brief and brutal fictions. Each word is worth a hundredweight, each story a full world. O'Riordan is a true original, fierce and fearless, she will travel anywhere for a great story. I can't wait for more!

Storm Warning by Vanessa Gebbie

Both haunted and haunting, Vanessa Gebbie's protagonists in these unsettling stories move through the present but remain always tethered to the past. No war stories these, but explorations of what it means to “survive” the conflicts and horrors created by humans across centuries and continents. Like Pat Barker, Gebbie gives voice to those who cannot forget, even decades later, who was taken and and what was lost in the blood and mud. Gebbie's strength lies in her poetic and poignant combination of reality and dream, the weaving together of outer experience and inner turbulence, and the small sparks of hope even in the darkest corners.

Hot Kitchen Snow by Susannah Rickards

The stories in this quietly powerful collection are populated by characters you care about from the opening sentence, children and adults whose lives you slip into in the midst of action. For Rickards, action is something as ordinary as a mother wondering whether to leave her children alone for five minutes or a dog-food salesman looking for meaning in his life; as magical as the father who kidnaps the moon for his daughter; or as quirky as the overweight dance administrator persuaded to put on a sari and take an Indian dance class. Whatever the context, Rickards’ stories grip and flow onwards, tiny twists and revelations exposing the undersides of life, both glowing and dark. This book will entertain, provoke, shock and surprise you in all the ways a great short story collection should.

In the Spirit of Phineas McLata by Lauri Kubuitsile

Lauri Kubuitsile's stories are sweet, salty, colourful, hot, and unforgettable. Botswana-flavoured and pregnant with atmosphere, Kubuitsile's writing slips easily between the real and the magical, between death and life, love and sex, humour and darkness, friendship and family. Just as McPhineas Lata wove his seductive spell on the village women, so too will these stories bewitch and enchant.

Housewife With A Half Life by Alison Wells

AB Wells is not only a supremely talented writer but also something of an alchemist. Housewife With a Half Life is wondrously original and imaginative, combining the travails of domesticity with glorious scientific allusions and illusions in a fast-paced and sparkling tale of a wife and mother who discovers she is losing herself, and the stranger from another dimension who turns up as she's cleaning the bathroom to make sure it doesn't happen. A wild ride, this nuclear fusion of a novel is, underneath it all, the story of relationships, of family, of what it means to be a mother, a wife, a woman, and, ultimately, a human being. Move over H.G., A B Wells has written the time-travelling tale for the 21st century!

Veronica Britton by Niall Boyce

I could say that Niall Boyce's fiction is X meets Y meets Z, but that would be doing it a severe injustice because it is a fabulously imaginative and unique combination of elements. Here we have historical fiction meets science fiction meets fantasy with a dash of philosophy and a sprinkling of feminism. I was captivated by chronic detective Veronica Britton and her sidekick, superheroines in every sense of the word, saving the world time and again, in and out of time. I was only sorry when I turned the last page and had to leave their exploits. Am eagerly awaiting the next one!

All the Bananas I've Never Eaten by Tony Williams

Tony Williams has a special talent for assembling the magical out of the mundane - whether that be pub carpets, satnavs, mattresses or bananas. These short short stories often deal in pain, in death, in loss and loneliness, in absence, in anger and in shame, but Williams always makes sure that fragments of hope emerge, like the music of an oboe, that short burst of happiness that lights up the dark.

I hope I haven't forgotten anyone! Right, that's your lot, something there for everyone, I think!

Jon Pinnock on Writing & Place

I'm delighted to welcome the excellent and talented Jon Pinnock to the blog today. Jon is the author of one of the few books that has ever had me laughing out loud, Mrs Darcy Versus the Aliens, a hilarious (and erudite) mashup of, well, Jane Austen and extraterrestrials! Jon and I chatted about that book here. Today, Jon is here because he has a brand new book, his first short story collection, Dot Dash (Salt Publishing). Congratulations! 

I was honoured that Jon asked me to provide a "blurb" for the book, and here's what I said:

In these wonderful short, very short and very very short stories, Jonathan Pinnock takes aim at all the foibles and vanities we think we succeed in hiding. Not content to just pull back the curtain, Pinnock sets fire to it and chuckles as it blazes. Yet he also executes something of a conjuring trick, making us laugh, but also making us feel, think. Like Nana, whose granddaughter recreates Cairo in her bedroom for her before she dies, we fabricate our own reality: we see and hear what we want and ignore what we don't. Dot Dash is sending us a message, and yes, it may be through yellow plastic ducks, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't listen.

 
I recommend this collection highly, as you can tell. Very highly. I thought as part of Jon's virtual book tour, I'd ask him my Writing& Place questionnaire, and he could use that to tell us a bit more about his writing. Here goes:

View from Jon's Window

Tania: Where are you? 
Jon: I live in a converted windmill in deepest Somerset. On a good day, I can just about see Glastonbury Tor from my office window. On other days, I just, like, feel the vibes.

 

T: How long have you been there?
J: We moved here about six months ago after a long and sustained campaign by my wife to get me to realise the merits of living in the country. Having finally made the move, my only regret is that I didn't give in years ago.

T: What do you write? 
J: I mainly write short stories and poems, and my first short story collection, "Dot Dash", was published by Salt in November. A couple of years ago, I did also somehow manage to complete a novel, Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens, and that was published by Proxima in September 2011. I've also recently completed an offbeat non-fiction memoir-type thing that is currently out on submission. As a writer, I'll try my hand at almost anything, mainly just to see if I can. Among the various projects languishing at the back of an old sock drawer are a very strange ultra-short radio play that earned me an interview in Broadcasting House in 1992 (which I completely failed to capitalise on), as well as several failed attempts at kids' books from the same period. One of these days, I'll find one thing to do and give it 100% focus. Although it will almost certainly turn out to be the wrong thing.

T: How do you think where you are affects what you write about and how you write? 

Another view from Jon's window

J: Very good question. Usually I would say that most of my writing process goes on in my head, uninfluenced by my surroundings. However, over the last six months, the fact of having moved house has had a massive effect on my writing, in that I've spent an inordinate time unpacked boxes and sorting out stuff INSTEAD of writing. However, once everything's nice and settled, I'm hoping that the fact that we're surrounded by fields will provide ample opportunities for taking long walks and getting inspired by Mother Nature. Alternatively, it may simply provide ample opportunities for taking long walks instead of writing. Basically, the jury's still out.

Thank you so much, Jon, what a view! Dot Dash, was published by Salt in November - buy the paperback here, find out more on the book's website and more about Jon on his. And if you are of the ebook persuasion, Dot Dash is available for only 0.77p for your Kindle today! And you can read other authors' Writing & Place interviews here.

Flash Slam & Bristol Short Story Prize Longlist

 I had a fantastic time as the guest "commentator" at the National Flash Fiction Day flash fiction slam last Wed in Oxford! Thanks so much to the inimitable Dan Holloway for organising, lovely to meet Twitter friends Pete Domican (who blogged about it here), Emily Cleaver and Sue Howe and see old mate Jon Pinnock, all of whom read beautifully, and Rebecca Emin, who judged beautifully! And huge congrats to flash slam winner Kevlin Henney - who read beautifully too, and entertained us immensely! He was in a very good mood the whole way home to Bristol, where he kindly dropped me off. A wonderful night had by all! Roll on next year's NFFD!

In other good news, the longlist for the Bristol Short Story Prize was announced today: 40 stories were longlisted out of a total of 2,304 entries. Some familiar names, many new to me!
  2012 Bristol Short Story Prize longlist:

Eugenia Will Come Back To You Someday – Kaj Anderson-Bauer (USA)
Naked As Eve – John Arnold (Australia)
Running to Nuthin’ – Lewis Bardsley (England)
Unearthed – Catherine Bokkers (The Netherlands)
The Swimmer – Lizzie Boyle (England)
Between Sea and Shore – Darci Bysouth (Scotland)
Dreams of Flying – Alexandra Carey (England)
Lobster – Alys Conran ( Wales)
Inked – Neil Durrant (Australia)
The Angel of the Warmth – Rachel J Fenton (New Zealand)
Time – Clare Fisher (England)
Battleground – Lisa Frank (Ireland)
Keith Morris is a Royal Plum – Martin Cathcart Froden (Scotland)
Something Somewhere Went Wrong – Sarah Gilmartin (Ireland)
People Like Her – Kerry Hood (England)
Apple Shot – Tracey Iceton (England)
Nice Blokes – Brian Jennings (England)
Meat – Avril Joy (England)
Dark Matter – Magda Knight (England)
Last Days of the Unicorn  - Danielle McLaughlin (Ireland)
On The Day Weldon Kees Disappeared – Alan Mumford (England)
Flashpoint – Susan Murray (England)
Heaven on the Horizon – Noel O’Regan (Ireland)
Ghost in the Machine – Christopher Parvin ( England)
Sharks, Choices – Matt Plass (England)
Horses – Thomas Pyner (England)
Yoki and the Toy Surprise – Angela Readman (England)
Going Grapefruit – Ian Richards (England)
Beekiller – Ethel Rohan (USA)
Forty-Five RPM in Chicago – Derek Routledge (Wales)
Senile – Safia Shah (England)
The Bird – Samantha Short (England)
The Attack at Delium – William Telford (England)
Mackerel for Tea – Rhoda Thompson (England)
Jelly Feel Real – Ellie Walsh (England)
After the Flood – Melanie Whipman ( England)
I Once Knew Salman Rushdie - Hilary Wilce (England)
The Life of Ethan – Emily Williamson (England)
Flowers on the Flagstone – Mairi Wilson (Scotland)
Symmetry – Samuel Wright  (England)


Highly Commended:
Crik Crak – E.L. Appleby ( England)
The Homecoming – Cait Atherton (Thailand)
And the Sea Gave Up Its Dead - Faith Barnes (Wales)
The Swanrite – Phillip Belcher
Last Wednesday – Cristina Burduja (England)
Stillness Comes – Michael John Burrows  (Canada)
Transition – Holly Corfield Carr (England)
Beautiful Horizon – Sharda Dean (England)
White – Mark Dixon (England)
Living – Samuel Dodson (England)
For Gracie – Ruth Driscoll (England)
Glimmer – Kat Ellis (Wales)
Vitiligo – Jo Else (England)
A Death in the Family – Kathleen English (England)
The Beginning – Louise Gethin  (England)
Where Steamers Wait... – T.D. Griggs (England)
Soap Opera in a Red Camaro – Norma Harrs (Canada)
A Young Country – Joanna Herrmann (England)
Angel Eggs – Nydia Hetherington ( England)
The Genitals and the Soul – David B Huebert (Canada)
Confessions of a Pigeon Feeder – Charlotte Humphries (England)
Puddings in the Park – Clair Humphries (England)
Lally – Tina Jackson  (England)
The Wish Improvement Mechanism – Amy Kellam (England)
Detective Noir – Ryan Anthony Licata (England)
Yellow River – Karen Lindsay
The Lady Bandit – Kelly Matsuura (Japan)
The Novel Factory – Luke Melia (England)
Geminids – Will Miles (England)
Sweetness – Lorraine Nevin (South Africa)
You Always Hurt – Michael Nicholson (England)
The Elephant Sun – Emyr Payne (Wales)
Frank Has Weeds – Mike Pym (England)
Greasbys – Olivia Rana (Northern Ireland)
Flight of Fancy – Mary Reynolds ( Ireland)
White Witch – Don Roy (Canada)
Afternoon Lullaby – Susha Chandra Ryner  ( England)
Craving – Erics Sail (England)
Moving In – Janet Swinney (England)
A Dance in the Bomb Shelter – Steven Tizzard


Congrats to all, fingers crossed for the shortlist!

Aliens aliens aliens... and Mrs Darcy

There are some books that I know I am going to love reading. There are other books I pretty much know that I won't. And then there are the third and possibly most delightful kind, the unknown unknowns, the ones that come at you from left field and - BAMM - you are smitten! Such a book is one Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens  by one Mr Jonathan Pinnock, just published by Proxima Books, an imprint of Salt Publishing. I thought "mashups", I thought "aliens", I thought, "oh my goodness, no!".

I was wrong.

I giggled. I chortled. I couldn't stop reading. Not only is this an utterly wonderful story and oddly fitting with Jane Austen's characters (Lady Catherine‎ de Bourgh, an alien? Of course, silly me for not knowing that). I can't help but feel that Jane would be quite pleased.

I am delighted to have the alien...um, sorry, author here today. Let me tell you a little about Mr Pinnock. He studied Maths at Cambridge University (a fact that endears him to me already, without the aliens). Then, as his bio says, "he drifted into the world of software and has remained there ever since. He has written one book on software development and co-authored a further dozen, most of which are now almost entirely obsolete. In the last few years he has turned to writing fiction and poetry and has won a number of prizes and has had work read on BBC Radio 4. Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens is his first full-length novel."

I already knew I enjoyed Jon's short stories, having (anonymously) highly commended his story, Advice re Elephants, when I judged last year's Sean O'Faolain short story competition and was part of the judging team who shortlisted his story rZr and Napoleon for the 2010 Bristol Short Story Prize. It's clear from these that he has a rather wicked sense of humour and a sly wit. So, I have asked him a few tricky questions, on your behalf:

Tania: Welcome, Jon. I recently met a very interesting biologist, Rachel Rodman, who also writes, and she has come up with a whole theory about literary mash-ups, of which I believe your book is one. Her article is published in LabLit. She calls you and your kind (!) "literary geneticists" and, using Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as her example, says: 

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is in this sense a genetically modified organism, derived from the ancestral Pride and Prejudice by the introduction of new (genetic) material taken from the unrelated "monster" genre. A small-scale comparison of the two texts supports this idea: all Grahame-Smith's modifications have parallels with genomic modifications performed (or harnessed) by laboratory scientists. Here, I examine six classes (Insertions, Duplications, Insertions with Duplication, Replacements, Over-expression, and Gain-of Function Mutations) of these modifications, and draw parallels with biological examples.

Her thesis is lengthy and erudite! So we will skip to her final thoughts:

These six sections consider only a few of the classes of Grahame-Smith's modifications. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is also marked by DNA inversions (in the form of transposed words and phrases), silent mutations (in the form of synonym replacements), and missense mutations (in the form of deliberately misspelled words), and so on. The molecular techniques used by Grahame-Smith have also been applied to other works, enabling the production of a range of genetically modified texts: Android Karenina, The Meowmorphosis, Jane Slayre, and others. These modified texts possess new phenotypes. Some are merely new twists of humor, curious for their own sake, like a mammal engineered to possess fluorescent skin. Others, more utilitarian, render the text appealing to new audiences, like a plant engineered for cold-resistance, enabling it to grow at new latitudes. The success of these variants – some commercial, some aesthetic – sets the stage for a new generation of literary geneticists, whose experiments will force the field in new directions. This new dynamic, converting the writing desk to a laboratory and the classic text to a model organism, may in addition pose its own ethical questions. We exist in a new era, exciting and disturbing, in which neither text nor genome is immutable, and in which humans, armed with new technologies, can force their evolution. [My emphasis]

Any reactions to this?

Jon:  Right, here goes...*deep breath* Firstly, a confession: I've never actually read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. This was partly because I was miffed about its unexpected appearance at a time when I was struggling to find a way into my own book and also because I didn't want to be accidentally influenced by it. I did feel obliged to refer to it in my book, because it would have felt odd not to acknowledge its presence, and it did provide an opportunity for going off at an interesting tangent with Jane Austen herself featuring as a disenchanted writer of cheap zombie novels. And I swear I never knew there were ninjas in P&P&Z until I read that article, although one of Jane Austen's supposed novels that I refer to also has ninjas in it!

However, having read the article, I am actually quite tempted to buy the book now because it makes it sound like an avant garde literary exercise worthy of Georges Perec or Tom Phillips. I like to think that what I'm doing is slightly different, because what I've written is an entirely logical sequel to the original book, rather than a mash-up of it. I originally described it as the bastard offspring following a drunken one-night stand between Pride and Prejudice and the X Files, which I guess in genetic terms means that it's less the result of gene splicing than the outcome of some dubious experimental breeding programme.

T: Dubious experimental breeding, love it! Entirely logical sequel? Ha! Okay, we'll keep this short: I couldn't stop laughing when I read the book, did you have that problem while you were writing it?

J: You're far too kind! Well, I know you're not supposed to laugh at your own jokes, but I did let out the occasional guffaw, usually when something completely unplanned emerged. Or at one of Lord Byron's double entendres. I have a weakness for those, I'm afraid.

T: And: I know you wrote it Dickens-like (or soap-operatically) in instalments, do you think your process/the end product would have been different if you'd attempted to do it all in one go, whatever that might mean?

J: Good question. It's a bit hypothetical, because I can't really think of any other way to write. I didn't have any sort of plan at all when I started writing the serialisation - although a plot of sorts did present itself once I'd got a chapter or two in. The thought of having a pin board with colour-coded timelines on it - well, it's just too weird to contemplate. Some of my favourite bits of Mrs Darcy... came about because I found myself at midnight on the day before the next episode was due to go live with nothing to publish. However, as a way of working it can be more than a little stressful.

T: Well, stress keeps us going, doesn't it? I say, Whatever works!

Thanks so much for stopping by, Jon. To whet your appetite, here's a pic I took of the book in the horror section of Waterstone's in Cork... Find out more, including how to buy it, excerpts and other crazy stuff, at Mrs Darcy And the Aliens and more about Jon and his other writings at jonathanpinnock.com.

Congratulations are in order!

There's nothing greater than being able to congratulate my smart and talented friends, and there's a lot today! First, the wonderful Lauri Kubuitsile is shortlisted for the highly prestigious Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story “In the spirit of McPhineas Lata” from The Bed Book of Short Stories published by Modjaji Books! Winner announced in July, fingers crossed, Lauri!

Second - huge congratulations to Andrea Ashworth and Jon Pinnock who, along with Cassandra Parkin, are the three winners of this year's Salt Publishing Scott Prize for debut short story collections. Their collections will be published in November, the UK's National Short Story Week. Can't wait to read them!

Addendum: Third lot of congratulations, to Tom Vowler, whose collection, The Method, has been shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, alongside collections from Helen Simpson, Polly Samson,Graham Mort and Michele Roberts. Winner announced in July. Read my interview with Tom here.