The third of my year-in-reading columns has gone up over at Dorian's blog: the best stuff I read in 2023.
Sunday 28 January 2024
Wednesday 10 January 2024
First to Knock, Mr Crabby
First to Knock also publish a free(!) irregular self-titled magazine, which even as a far-flung Australian I have been able to subscribe to, so I'll be interested to see an issue of that when it arrives. The covers so far (with Bruno providing the art to issue 1):
Tuesday 21 November 2023
Book Launch for Gibbons or One Bloody Thing After Another by James Morrison
Tuesday 17 October 2023
Book Launch
Tuesday 19 September 2023
GIBBONS
My book is out, published by the good folk at Orbis Tertius Press, should you wish to read it. You do wish to read it, right? It's the discontinuous narrative of an Australian family in short stories, including glass eyes, false mermaids, inadvertent death, nuclear weapons, and the accidental destruction of the Sydney Opera House.
You can buy it here for now. At some imminent-ish future date it should be available on Amazon, where it may be cheaper (but I'll get very little in the way of money), assuming you can square that with your conscience. That's up to you, I'm not your mother.
There's a zero-budget book trailer here:
Thursday 7 September 2023
100 Great Short Books
Because I will be doing a monthly thing next year with the mighty Brad Bigelow about novellas, here's the full list of 100 great short books I recommended on Twitter, in one place for ease of reference.
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Astonishingly convincing novella about a 17th-Century Dutchman, his travels, his loves and his failures. Found in this collection (also available as 'Two Stories and a Dream'), with its equally successful sequel novella, A LOVELY MORNING.
Verse novel encapsulating the whole life of a Norwegian man in the 1800s, and the life of the woman who is unlucky enough to marry him. Big themes, done with a delicately light touch.
It's the arse-end of WW2, you're an exhausted partisan fighting in the wreckage of Germany, and you find a beautiful, empty untouched house, an oasis of peace. What would you do to keep it for yourself?
Blind beekeeper, beekeeper's assistant, the hives of bees: all have their own voices in this wonderful connected collection of poems
A creepy, decaying city hosts a creepy, decaying man in mourning as he sinks into sexual obsession and murderousness. What's not to like?
A novella about a near-affectless young artist adrift in Seoul, switching seamlessly through different times of her life. Perhaps more straightforward than Suah's longer works, but showing most of her preoccupations and strengths.
A very effective and nastily stinging brief novella of betrayal and revenge, told entirely through letters. One of the books which warned of the dangers of the Nazis and was inevitably ignored by the people who should have listened.
Passivity, resistance and collaboration in WW2 Poland; what is your life worth?
A perfect argument for why there should be more brief biographies of eccentric people by masterful novelists.
Rich and strange and incantatory and ominous and Bomb-shadowed. A terrible Black Mass is brewing, and five THINGS are coming across the sea to stop it.
Just a perfect little novel about a neglected suburban housewife who falls in love with a swampy sea monster.
Incredibly uncomfortable, weirdly comic novella about love, sex, and being used and abused. Alarming and excellent.
(also published as PEREIRA MAINTAINS) Salazar's Portugal, a man trying to stand above the fray, a politicised encounter, a wonderful voice
Jealousy and sex and beauty and love filtered through the prism of Keats, in the form of a verse novella
Dialogue-driven linked stories of people on the run in three widely separated timezones (Roman Britain, English Civil War, 1970s) near the hill/castle/town of Mow Cop; strange and mad and wonderful
Genuinely hilarious Hungarian satire on school life from the pupils' point of view. Impossible to find copies, but available online here.
Another Hungarian, much less funny, but still wonderful: a man glimpses the Union Jack in the midst of the 1956 uprising, and it unleashes a contemplative mental spiral as the Soviet army prepares to invade.
An orphaned young boy in a TB sanatorium in the winter of 1946, written in a single day. An absolute gem, perfectly polished.
A group of people secretly living among us who are refugees from... something. A witty and clever example of why novellas are often the ideal length for science-fiction.
A bored bookseller falls in love/lust/obsession with a sexy young book thief. AND WHY WOULDN'T YOU?
American-occupied postwar Japan, and the editor of a relatively sophisticated Osaka newspaper gets mixed up in a scheme by a crime figure to organise a bullfight tournament.
How things can go wrong when trying to seduce a married woman by reading her Goethe's 'Faust' when that's one of the things her husband JUST WON'T DO. Books will ruin your life.
A woman on the way to Siberia, caught in a web of memories and emotions involving two old loves (one dead, one incommunicado), an old lady in her Parisian apartment, and the Russian landscape.
There aren't many extremely subtle novels of manners set on a space station in an alternative future where Vietname and China established Confucian galactic empires, and on this evidence that is a real shame.
Modernist, semi-existentialist goodness about a recently released political prisoner roaming Cairo, lost in the changing Egypt, and spying on his neighbours while under house arrest.
Fragmented, oddly sweet story of someone interviewing her funeral worker father to capture all of his weird stories and strange workplace advice.
The old story: you come to work; management slowly floods the workplace to improve productivity (improve sales or drown)
An absolutely monstrous matriarch rules over her house and her family in this pitch-perfect black comedy of nastiness in an Anglo-Irish Big House.
Strange and sometimes almost sweet fictionalised memoir of the time a young Bernhard shared a hospital with his friend Paul, a nephew of Wittgenstein; Bernhard for his endlessly knackered lungs, Paul for mental illness
Pleasingly mental tale of a deeply weird boarding school for girls that focuses entirely on bodily movement before releasing its charges entirely ill-equipped into the adult world
Funny, scathing brief biography of the first book of self-help pablum and its faintly ridiculous author
Gaskell goes full-on Gothic in a bleak novella based on the Salem Witch Trials
The narrator surveys the ashy wasteland, haunted by the grisly "garbagemen", in this bleak novella of repressed history and the permanence of decay
A garden in Norway, the love and life's work of Haakon's mother. But now she has a young assistant, Felice, and Haakon is being pushed aside. The quietest power struggle in literature ensues.
One of Blecher's several small masterpieces, a fictionalisation of his youth full of terrifying, visionary premonitions
Weirdly touching novella about consciousness, a sort of parenthood, AI and independence; available in the excellent EXHALATION collection.
Grim as grim verse novel about a massive flood and its psychological toll on a woman who stays put in her mostly submerged house
The ultimate young-love-going-sour-but-also-French novel, one of her many compact masterpieces, almost all of which are shamefully out of print in English because we are unworthy
Extremely funny, extremely uncomfortable fragmented diary-like tale of a year in a NZ woman's ill-considered life
Riwoe fleshes out a minor Malay character from one of Somerset Maugham's 'Far Eastern Tales', giving her a richly textured history and tragic life story
See a man thoroughly manipulated, debased and destroyed! Lots of dark, seedy fun about power plays and switching roles.
A servant embarks and what to him is just another affair with a married woman, not realising the emotional storm and violence he's about to unleash. The title will give you some hints.
A stranger comes to town. All hell breaks loose.
(A deliberate attempt to do an Estonia "spaghetti Western", this succeeds in every way.)
Forster-channelling novella about the death of Joseph Conrad; beautifully observed only book by a writer who then sadly died himself.
Deeply grim and funny workplace comedy about a terrible employee in a terrible workplace and her obsession with/loathing of her even more terrible office-mate.
Strange, wondrous story of transcendence about a man drinking himself to death, written by a genius in the process of drinking himself to death
A woman on a train unravels the mystery of her life; a compact masterpiece admired by Muriel Spark, who was no stranger to compact masterpieces
Weird, vivid fairy-story-ish fantasy of exiled children, talking shapeshifting animals and the language of dragons.
An origin story--a verse saga--of some future civilisation, drawn from the story of a group of children who (mostly) survive the fiery catastrophe that destroys ours.
Ending this list with a second duel, this time in an autobiographical novella about two men (exiled Venetian, polish aristocrat) who end up in a battle of honour over a woman neither of them actually likes
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