Simon appleby

Posted on June 24, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

Serpentine Summer Reads

We may be slipping into one of Jarett Kobek’s alternate universes, but we’re going to jump the gun here and say summer has *finally* arrived! While you’ve been buried under a wardrobe of linen reaching blindly for that stray picnic blanket, we’ve pulled together our summer picks to make your sun-soaking quest that much quicker.

‘Brilliantly funny … the best satire of our contemporary nightmare that you will ever see, and very possibly the last.’ Alan Moore

It’s 2019 and Jarett Kobek has done the only thing a dissident American novelist can do in those circumstances: he’s joined the party and written fantasy novel about an immortal fairy queen and a shadowy billionaire philanthropist sheikh called Dennis. Hilarious, provocative and unmissable, Only Americans Burn in Hell is the only novel for our certifiably insane times.

Read here: the office lobby of a global conglomerate – Google, Amazon etc
Pair with: coffee, painkillers, sweets
Watch after: The Good Place, Black Mirror, Who is America?

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

‘Takes the issues raised by #MeToo and shows them as inextricable from more universal questions.’ Guardian

Trust Exercise is an enthralling, captivating novel about the treacherous terrain of adolescence, how we define consent, and what we lose, gain and never get over as we navigate our way into adulthood’s mysterious structures of sex and power.

Read here: a theatre cafe
Pair with: Kit Kats, Ice Cream
Watch after: Sex Education, Alias Grace, Thirteen Reasons Why

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

‘It is not for the faint-hearted, but they should read it anyway.’ Peter Stanford

In The Beekeeper of Sinjar, the acclaimed poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail tells the harrowing stories of women from across Iraq who have managed to escape the clutches of ISIS.

Dunya Mikhail weaves together the women’s tales of endurance and near-impossible escape with the story of her own exile and her dreams for the future of Iraq.

Read here: bookclub
Pair with: honey, milk, canned soup, bread
Watch after: Black Crows, I was a Yazidi Slave, Where We Belong

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

‘Memoirs Of An Ex-Prom Queen will make you laugh and want to smash the patriarchy.’ Red

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen is a cult classic that defined a generation. First published in 1972, Alix Kates Shulman’s landmark novel follows Sasha’s coming of age through the sexual double standards, job discrimination and harassment of the 1950s and 60s. Five decades later, it remains a funny and heartbreaking story of a young woman in a man’s world.

Read here: The bath, wearing a tiara
Pair with: eggs bene, shrimp cocktail, éclair, baba au rum
Watch after: Dumplin’, Mad Men, The Good Wife

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

‘Scandinavia’s answer to Jonathan Franzen.’ Telegraph

How do we live if we know that the world is about to end? From the outside, Erik, Julia and their children form a happy young family looking forward to a long holiday together on the west coast of Finland. But look under the surface, and their happiness shows signs of not lasting the summer. In the The Summer House Philip Teir transports us into a compelling summer drama about life choices and lies, about childhood and adulthood.

Read here: an Airbnb, around a campfire
Pair with: barbecue, new potatoes, Brita cake, wine
Watch after: Bonus Family, This is Us

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

‘This is an extraordinary, quite brilliant book.’ C J Sansom

Herbert Powyss longs to make his mark in the field of science and sets up a radical experiment in isolation: for seven years a subject will inhabit the cellar of a manor house in solitude. The Warlow Experiment is ‘powerful’, ‘unsettling’, ‘extraordinary’, ‘brilliant’, ‘gripping’ and ‘unusual’ – well-deserved descriptors for an unforgettable novel. This eighteenth-century underground experiment gone wrong will leave you feeling extremely grateful for fresh air and sunlight.

Read here: a well-lit, cosy chair above ground
Pair with: porter, potatoes, green veg, orange jelly
Watch after: The Handmaid’s Tale, You, The Rain

Pre-order your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

‘Insightful and endearing, this is a lovely look at friendship and human fragility.’ Psychologies

What’s the point of friends if you can’t share your secrets? The Gunners follows a gang of latchkey kids as they navigate the difficult journey through childhood to adolescence. One day, Sally stops speaking to the group and when they meet again years later at Sally’s funeral, everything has changed. Rebecca Kauffman’s generous tale of friendship in adulthood encourages us all to reflect on what separates true friends from the rest.

Read here: a swing seat, surrounded by childhood friends
Pair with: cereal, cookies, coffee, ramen noodles, Côtes du Rhône
Watch after: The Breakfast Club, Big Little Lies, Stranger Things

Pre-order your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION

No summer reading list is complete without a short story collection. In the nine unforgettable stories of A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley explores the unseen tenderness of black men and boys: the struggle to love and be loved, the invisible ties of family and friendship, and the inescapable forces of race, class and masculinity. A Lucky Man is a striking snapshot of the inner lives of men and boys caught between hope and expectation, duty and desire.

Read here: downing street
Pair with: burgers, hot dogs, potato salad, corn, beer
Watch after: When They See Us, Moonlight, Luke Cage

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

‘Something quite special, unlike anything else I’ve ever read.’ Tessa Hadley

Ella is nearing thirty and she’s found herself in an unintended career as a care worker. One spring, Bryn hires her to help him care for his wife Jill. It’s not long until Ella’s entangled in their relationship and is forced to reconsider her understanding of relationships of all kinds. Lose yourself under a shady tree in Lila Savage’s debut tale of love and compassion and the fluidity of desire.

Read here: a landscaped garden, under a shady tree
Pair with: chilled sweet rhubarb soup, pad thai, Cup O’Noodles
Watch after: What/If, Gentleman Jack, Away From Her

Pre-order your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

‘Exhilarating … A rich resurrection of a forgotten history.’ The New York Times

At the dawn of the twentieth century, black women in the US were carving out new ways of living. Wrestling with the question of freedom, they invented forms of love and solidarity outside convention and law. These were the pioneers of free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer identities, and single motherhood. Saidiya Hartman’s genre-defining history recovers the radical aspirations and insurgent desires of young black women in their invention of freedom.

Read here: your favourite cafe
Pair with: pitcher of beer, chop suey
Watch after: She’s Gotta Have It, Homecoming, Hidden Figures

Pre-order your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

‘Absolutely absorbing, fascinating and indispensable.’ Alice Walker

A writer of the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen’s novels are moving, characterful, and important. She pioneered writing about the conflicts of sexuality, race and the secret suffering of women in the early twentieth century. Critically acclaimed, both Quicksand and Passing speak powerfully of the contradictions and restrictions experienced by black women at that time.

Read here: the park
Pair with: White Rock, ginger ale, sandwiches
Watch after: Chewing Gum, Dear White People, Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

Posted on June 6, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

Donate to Beauty Banks with Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen

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We are mega excited to be teaming up with Waterstones Islington and the charity Beauty Banks to celebrate the publication of Alix Kates Shulman’s cult classic Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.

Beauty Banks, set up by Guardian beauty columnist Sali Hughes, collects sanitary items for people who can’t afford them. They then re-package and distribute parcels to charity partners – registered foodbanks & shelters who ensure donations get to those who need them.

Waterstones Islington (map) has a collection box in-store for anyone local who is able to drop stuff off. Anyone who donates can get 10% off their copy of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen.

Find out more about Beauty Banks and follow them on Instagram

Follow @wstoneislington & @serpentstail with #MemoirsofanExPromQueen to get updates on the campaign.

Posted on June 3, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen: read an extract

First published in the 1970s, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen was called ‘shocking’ and even ‘traumatic’ for its frank and darkly funny approach to themes such as abortion, domestic abuse, job inequality, body image and sexual abuse. It’s sold over a million copies and is still as fresh and relevant today as it ever was.

Sasha Davis has everything a girl in 1950s suburbia could want: beauty, intelligence and a Prom Queen crown. But when she drops out of college to marry, Sasha realises her life has become a fearful countdown to her thirtieth birthday – the year when her beauty will have faded. As Sasha rebels against her fate, she experiences an intellectual and sexual awakening that might be her only chance of outrunning the aging process.

Read an extract below.

Follow @ExPromQueen1 on Twitter for daily quotes

Buy your copy from Waterstones, Amazon, Hive or Serpent’s Tail

Chapter 2

They say it’s worse to be ugly. I think it must only be different. If you’re pretty, you are subject to one set of assaults; if you’re plain you are subject to another. Pretty, you may have more men to choose from, but you have more anxiety too, knowing your looks, which really have nothing to do with you, will disappear. Pretty girls have few friends. Kicked out of mankind in elementary school, and then kicked out of womankind in junior high, pretty girls have a lower birth rate and a higher mortality. It is the beauties like Marilyn Monroe who swallow twenty-five Nembutals on a Saturday night and kill themselves in their thirties.

Pretty or plain, by the time you survive puberty, your job in life is pretty much cut out for you. In either case, you must somehow wheedle back into that humanity from which you have been systematically excluded since you learned to walk. Among the ruling fraternity whose members can often barely hide their contempt for you, you must find one sponsor willing to brave ridicule for love of you. You must make him desire you more than manliness. For boys are taught that it is weak to need a woman, as girls are taught it is their strength to win a man.

When on the brink of puberty I emerged from behind my braces with a radiant smile, long black eyelashes, and a pink glowing skin, my troubles were only beginning. I suppose I should have expected a hitch: in the fairy tales too there was usually a steep price to pay for a wish fulfilled. The Blue Fairy had blessed my face all right, but suddenly there was my body. I loathed it. It frightened me, it was so unpredictable. It was nothing if not trouble. People were always ready to make fun of it. They made fun of it for not having breasts, and then they made fun of it for having them. It had once supported me in the trees and on the exercise bars, but I could no longer trust it. I hated walking on the street inside it. On the slightest provocation I blushed crimson, and then they made fun of it for that. My very blood betrayed me. What had my body to do with the me inside?

One day I got out of the bath bleeding down there, and from the nervous way my mother said it was “natural” after I screamed for her from the bathroom, I knew for sure I was a freak.

“Stay calm. I’m going to explain the whole thing to you,” she said. “It’s really nothing to get upset about, dear.” She smiled and patted my cheek as blood trickled down my rippleless thigh to my unshaven calf.

I was way past being upset. I was so horrified by my sudden wound that I was detached, as though I were watching a mildly interesting home movie of myself. My leg had known blood before—there were scabs and scrapes along the shinbone and around the ankles, and cinders permanently imbedded under the skin of both knees—but never blood before from there. That it didn’t burn or sting like other wounds only made it more sinister. I was sure my curious finger had injured something. I was probably ruined. It was likely too late even to confess.

“Sit down on the toilet and wait a minute while I go get something. And don’t worry, darling.” She sounded almost pleased as, leaving the room and closing the door behind her, she chuckled to herself, “Well, well, well.”

I examined the water still in the tub, lapping gently at the dirty ring. A faint trail of blood led from the tub to the sink where I, a good girl, had stood avoiding the bathmat. Was there blood in the bath water too? Oh, no! There was blood on my fingers and now blood smeared on the towel which other days polished to gleaming my sunburnt skin, cleansed in the chlorine of the public pool. What was taking her so long? Everything I touched was getting soiled.

Seated on the toilet, I looked down at myself. It was hard to see, not like my brother’s. The mysteries were inside—to keep us, I guessed, from seeing them. To use a mirror, even in this crisis, would have been suspect (suppose she walked in and saw me?), though indeed it might have helped, as my father had taught me it helped to watch the dentist in a mirror drilling out tooth decay. I had always hidden it so carefully, a mirror now would be doubly suspect. I could hear my father urging over the hum of the drill: watch and relax, reeeelax, let go, and the pain had somehow slipped away. But my father couldn’t advise me now. Anyway, if I relaxed now, wouldn’t the blood come streaming out? I tightened up.

The blood wasn’t flowing, exactly. Every so often, when I thought it had stopped and formed a scab, more would ooze out without registering as sensation at all. Like cells seen through a microscope, the blood moved slowly, surreptitiously. It wasn’t the familiar color, either—it was ominously deeper.

At last mother came back, carrying equipment. She locked the door behind her and shored me up with a smile. “Now,” she began. “This is called a sanitary belt.” She held it up. “It holds the sanitary napkin.” Like a stewardess demonstrating the oxygen mask, she held them up, the long bandage dangling by its tail from her index finger and thumb. Sterile.

Follow @ExPromQueen1 on Twitter for daily quotes

Buy your copy from Waterstones, Amazon, Hive or Serpent’s Tail

Posted on May 22, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen: read the author’s introduction

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen by Alix Kates Shulman is the feminist cult classic first published in the 70s. It has sold over a million copies worldwide and changed the face of a generation. The novel follows the life of Sasha, a former high school prom queen who, after dropping out of college realises her life has become a fearful countdown to her thirtieth birthday – the year when her beauty will have faded entirely.

For our reissue, Alix has written a new introduction – which shows how women are still facing many of the same challenges as they were forty years ago.

Read the introduction in full on our blog
Find out more about Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen
Follow @expromqueen1 on Twitter

Half a century ago, in the early, explosive days of women’s liberation, I wrote my darkly comic novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen to demonstrate why, given society’s treatment of girls and women, a feminist movement was necessary. A sardonic portrayal of one middle-class, white, Midwestern American girl’s coming-of-age, the novel takes a wry look at a range of experiences treated back then as either taboo or trivial—violence, rape, illegal abortion, the sexual double standard, daily humiliations, job discrimination, the frantic quest for beauty, the double binds of marriage, motherhood, and love—all business-as-usual between the sexes.

Today, many of the predicaments in which the titular ex-prom queen Sasha Davis found herself have a powerful, emotionally charged name: “sexual harassment”—a term not coined until well after I wrote the novel.

In the three years between my book proposal and the novel’s 1972 publication, enough people had been touched by feminist ideas to create a hunger for a new view of women’s experience that made my novel a bestseller. My proposal had earned a token advance, but well before publication the book began to take off. The galley proofs, which as a matter of course circulated among the paperback reprint houses, became hot items, passing quickly from hand to hand among the secretaries (a word that had not yet been replaced in publishing by “editorial assistant”); Publishers Weekly, the trade journal that reviews books six or more weeks before publication, announced that “this book already has a substantial underground reputation.” The publishing executives— all male in those days when newspapers’ Help Wanted columns were still unabashedly headed “Help Wanted, Male” and “Help Wanted, Female”—were mystified by the book’s prepublication buzz and took me aside to ask what its secret appeal could be. Nevertheless, on the day reprint rights were auctioned, not only did every major reprint house enter the bidding, but the winning bid established a new record for paperback rights to a first novel. A pittance compared with today’s prices, but still enough to ensure that I could continue to write my books and to enable me to send checks of gratitude to every feminist journal that had taken the early risk of publishing me—audacious journals with names like Up from Under, Women: A Journal of Liberation, and Aphra, named to honor Aphra Behn (1640–1689), known as the first Western woman to earn her living by writing.

While early reviewers found the novel “shocking,” “astonishing,” even “traumatic,” women readers responded with recognition. Feminists laughed out loud as they read it, potential feminists cried, others were puzzled or outraged—like the young man who wrote to me, soon after the novel was published, blaming me for his wife’s leaving him and taking their baby with her after reading Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. “Don’t you think,” I wrote back to the fellow, “you might have had something to do with it?”

As the women’s movement continued to spread, turning its ideas from “shocking” to widely accepted, the novel, with its pre-feminist setting, was elevated to the category “feminist classic.” This kept it ever in print in the United States, even as the anti-movement backlash gained such force that young women spurned the label “feminist” while embracing the many benefits the movement had won for them. As the book enjoyed a 25th anniversary edition, a 35th anniversary edition, and a 40th anniversary e-book edition, Sasha and her author celebrated, but with mixed emotions, knowing that the social movement that had inspired the novel was moribund.

Then I was as surprised as anyone by the grave political upheavals that recently rendered Sasha’s daily struggles baldly contemporary and the subject of fierce political action. #MeToo. #TimesUp. A revitalized women’s movement, diverse and determined, marching through the world in protest. The word “feminist,” so long disdained, is again respected, and media that formerly ignored women’s oppression or scorned women’s work now regularly cover them; at the same time, the revivified rightwing backlash against feminism hovers over the present like pollution smog. Along with other feminist “classics,” Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, which dramatizes and satirizes every sort of sexual harassment, is being read with new eyes. Sasha Davis, the pre-feminist prom queen, may be seen as a harbinger of today’s outrages, and her story a measure of both how far we have come and how far we still have to go.

Posted on May 21, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

A Q&A with The Pine Islands translator Jen Calleja

Jen Calleja is the translator of, among other works, Marion Poschmann’s The Pine Islands, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize 2019. A short novel that packs a huge punch, The Pine Islands tells the story of Gilbert Sylvester, who, after dreaming his wife cheated on him, spontaneously flees to Japan. There he meets a young man, Yosa, and they travel together – one in search of death, the other a new beginning.

Congratulations on being shortlisted for the Man Booker International! We absolutely love your translation of The Pine Islands. How does it feel to be shortlisted as translator?

It feels very surreal, but I’m obviously very proud and very pleased for Marion that the book is getting this kind of recognition.

How did you get into translating books?

I’ve always been a writer, I probably started before my teens, so have always been interested in stories. I used to like writing my own versions of stories too, like Enid Blyton’s The Faraway Tree and The Nancy Drew Mysteries. After spending some time in Munich when I was eighteen/nineteen, I came back to England to study for a degree in media and modern literature and started reading novels in German on the side. I ended up doing a masters in German studies and learned all about literary translation while on the course and thought: that sounds like the perfect job, one that mixed writing/rewriting and German. I got offered my first book translation before I’d finished the course, out of the blue. I always say that the day I started live-translating a section of a novel I loved to my now husband was the moment I became a literary translator.

Did you talk to Marion Poschmann during the translation process? What’s the relationship between author and translator?

I tried not to disturb her too much as she was off on wild adventures, but I did send her my translation with questions about ambiguities or whether certain things were references or allusions to something, which she answered for me. She was very encouraging and has been very complimentary of the translation, which is a great feeling. I’ll be meeting her for the first time at the announcement event. The relationship between an author and translator always differs. I’ve translated writers who I’ve never met or spoken to, and I’ve translated authors who I worked very closely with and who I now consider very close friends. I’m going on holiday with one of my authors soon.

How did you find translating The Pine Islands? Did you laugh a lot?

It was a wonderful book to translate, really beautifully written. It took a lot of work to have it sound as finely wrought as the original. And yes, it’s a very darkly funny book. It really walks on a tightrope between viciously satirising and being sympathetic to the lives of men who are both privileged and trapped within patriarchal society. It’s so much more than a male mid-life crisis novel – I’ve read too many of those in both English and German. Gilbert is a tragic character, but he is so churned up by his inadequacy he projects it onto others, and this is where Marion lays Gilbert bare.

What other German books would you recommend to readers?

In English translation I would recommend Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada translated by Susan Bernofsky and published by Portobello. It’s a story of three generations of polar bears (an exiled writer, a circus performer, a zoo exhibit). I will never get bored of following Tawada’s eye as she takes in the world. It won the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2017.

Find out more about The Pine Islands
Follow Jen Calleja @niewview on Twitter

Posted on May 7, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

Feminist Book Fortnight: our reading recommendations

One of our favourite fortnights of the year, Feminist Book Fortnight gives us the opportunity to blow our own trumpet and tell you about the incredible women authors and feminist books on our list – of which there are many.

Here are just a few of the incredible books we publish, and a look at books we have coming up this year.

Join us on Twitter & tell us what you’re reading for #FeministBookFortnight

The lost classic that defined a generation – over a million copies sold

Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, first published in the 1970s, is still shockingly fresh and relevant today.

Sasha Davis has everything a girl growing up in 1950s suburbia could want: beauty, intelligence and an all-star sports captain boyfriend.

But when she drops out of college to marry, Sasha realises her life has become a fearful countdown to her thirtieth birthday – the year when her beauty will have faded entirely, and life as she knows it will end. As Sasha begins to rebel against her perfect, conservative upbringing, she finds herself experiencing an awakening that might be her only chance of outrunning the aging process.

Pre-order your copy

A novel of love and loss in the post-communist diaspora for fans

A vivid, painful, dreamlike story of two young Czech girls whose lives move between 1980s Prague, suburban Wisconsin and the alleyways of Paris where they are inexorably drawn… of David Lynch & Elena Ferrante

If you loved My Brilliant Friend but are ready for something more surreal and gorgeously queer, look no further.

Buy your copy

‘The most important book written about men and women written in the last century’ Guardian

When Chris Kraus, an unsuccessful artist pushing 40, falls for a rogue academic named Dick, she enlists her husband in her haunted pursuit. When Dick fails to answer their letters Chris continues alone, transforming an adolescent infatuation into a new form of philosophy.

Widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades, I Love Dick is still essential reading; as relevant, fierce and funny as ever.

Buy your copy

The sensational erotic memoir that shocked the world

A window into a life of insatiable desire and uninhibited sex – this is Parisian art critic Catherine M.’s account of her sexual awakening and her unrestrained pursuit of pleasure.

From the glamorous singles clubs of Paris to the Bois de Boulogne, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., breaks with accepted ideas of sex and examines many alternative manifestations of desire.

Buy your copy

‘Think BBC’s Fleabag set in Brooklyn’ Stylist

‘I’m alone. I’m a drinker. I’m a former artist. I’m a shrieker in bed. I’m the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh.’

Andrea is a single, childless 39-year-old woman who tries to navigate family, sexuality, friendships and a career she never wanted, but battles with thoughts and desires that few people would want to face up to.

Powerfully intelligent and wickedly funny, All Grown Up delves into the psyche of a flawed but mesmerising character. You’ll recognise yoruself in Jami Attenberg’s truthful account of womanhood, though you might not want to admit it.

Buy your copy

‘Dead smart and gloriously, mercifully, snort-out-loud hilarious’ Dazed

Ann-Marie is 23, her life has collapsed, and she’s blaming everyone but herself.

Fiercely clever and unapologetically wild, Eat My Heart Out is the satire for our narcissistic, hedonistic, post-post-feminist era.From neo-burlesque pop-up strip clubs, to ironic Little Mermaid-themed warehouse parties via disastrous one night stands with extravagantly unsuitable men, naked cleaning jobs, a forced appearance on Woman’s Hour and baby boomer house parties in Islington, Ann-Marie hurtles through London and life, urged on by legnedary feminist Stephanie, who is convinced that if she can save Ann-Marie she’ll rescue an entire generation from the curse of ironic detachment.

Winner of the Betty Trask Prize

Buy your copy

Critically acclaimed classics of women’s literature exploring race

Quicksand, written in 1928, is an autobiographical novel about a mixed race woman caught between fulfilling her desires and gaining respectability in her middle class neighbourhood. Written a year later, Passing tells the story of two childhood friends, Clare and Irene, both light skinned enough to pass as white. Reconnecting in adulthood, Clare has chosen to live as a white woman, while Irene embraces black culture.

Nella Larsen’s novels are moving, characterful, and important books. She pioneered writing about the conflicts of sexuality, race and the secret suffering of women in the early twentieth century.

Buy your copy

A prize-winning, genre-bending collection of short stories

Shortlisted for the National Book Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize, Her Body and Other Parties has already reached cult status.

A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the mysterious green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague spreads across the earth. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery about a store’s dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted house guest.

A dark, shimmering slice into womanhood, Her Body and Other Parties is wicked and exquisite.

Buy your copy

The feminist adventure novel the world has been waiting for

Erin is 19 and wondering why it’s always men who get to go on all the cool wilderness adventures. So she sets off on a voyage into the Alaskan wilderness, a one-woman challenge to the archetype of the rugged male explorer.

Buy your copy

The internet has collapsed the boundaries of time, space, and desire. However far apart lovers are, can they ever really break up?

This is the question Walsh’s narrator must reckon with as she travels across Europe after the end of a love affair conducted largely online. This pilgrimage through ‘offline’ space dictated by chance – on railways, on buses, on planes and, above all, on foot – reclaims and reshapes the territory of the male travel writer.

This is a work about borders – between places, people, genres – and how we might cross them. From Rome to Budapest, Freud to Foucault, algorithms to nostalgia, this is a stimulating, original work which dismantles what we know of love, and how we make art from it, and finds a new form and language for the way we love now.

Buy your copy

Posted on April 16, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

Our Easter weekend reading recommendations

Forget hunting for chocolate eggs, we’ve put together a list of recommended reads to keep you busy this Easter weekend. From Man Booker favourites to captivating true stories, here is a selection of treats you can really gorge yourself on!

50 extraordinary new stories from The Moth

Storytelling phenomenon The Moth presents Occasional Magic, a selection of 50 of the finest true stories from recent shows featuring voices familiar and new. Alongside Neil Gaiman, Adam Gopnik, Andrew Solomon, Rosanne Cash, and Cristina Lamb, there are stories from around the world describing moments of strength, passion, courage and humour – and when a little magic happened.

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018

‘Destined to become a future classic … that rare book that should appeal to every kind of reader’ Guardian

When two English brothers take the helm of a Barbados sugar plantation, Washington Black – an eleven-year-old field slave – finds himself selected as personal servant to one of them, the eccentric Christopher ‘Titch’ Wilde .

Inspired by a true story, Washington Black is an extraordinary tale of a world destroyed and made whole again.

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

‘Brilliantly funny … the best satire of our contemporary nightmare that you will ever see, and very possibly the last’ Alan Moore

It’s 2019 and America is ruled over by a billionaire reality TV star. Its media is owned by a transnational class of the shameless and the depraved. And its people have been silently robbed of their wealth, their dignity and their democracy.

In this brave new world, going to see a superhero movie counts as activism, and arguing with the other serfs on social media is political engagement. BUT EVERYTHING’S FINE – as long as you never, ever ask yourself who makes money from the ticket sales and the ratings, or who owns Twitter.

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

A powerful fable about a surgeon negotiating the fine line between life and death

As dusk approaches, a former surgeon goes about closing up his dilapidated clinic in rural India. That night, as the surgeon completes his paperwork, he is visited by a family – a teacher, his heavily pregnant wife and their young son. Victims of a senseless attack, they reveal to the surgeon wounds that they could not possibly have survived.

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2019 – a charming, playful, profound tale of lost souls in search of transformation in modern Japan

When Gilbert Silvester wakes one day from a dream that his wife has cheated on him, he flees – immediately, irrationally, inexplicably – for Japan.Serene, playful and profound, The Pine Islands is a story of the transformations we seek and the ones we find along the way.

Buy your copy with 10% off & free UK shipping

A bittersweet story of clashing beliefs and confused identities from debut author Susan Finlay

Margaret O’Shea never thought she’d find herself praying for the life of an English soldier. But with her grandson Eoin fighting in Iraq, Margaret can’t do anything but say the rosary and hope that he comes home unscathed. His fiancée Katarzyna is a good Catholic girl, even if she goes to Nottingham’s Polish church rather than its Irish one. What Margaret doesn’t know is that Kathy’s way of coping with Eoin’s absence goes beyond prayer or reading horoscopes.

Her friend David has been studying Chaos Magic to distract himself from his new post-PhD career selling figurines of rat men to acne-ridden teenagers and wants Kathy to participate in his Rite of Internet Love. But everyone gets more chaos than they bargained for when a video of a wounded Iraqi and a soldier who looks a lot like Eoin starts circulating. This is a sharp, wry and moving debut novel about love, faith and what normal people do when they don’t have any of the answers.

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Posted on April 10, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

The Pine Islands is shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize

The Man Booker International Prize has revealed the shortlist for the 2019 prize that celebrates the finest works of translated fiction from around the world. We are thrilled that Marion Poschmann’s quiet, funny and beautiful The Pine Islands, translated by Jen Calleja, is on the list.

The Pine Islands was shortlisted for the German Book Prize, won the Berlin Prize for Literature and is an international bestseller.

About the book

When Gilbert Silvester wakes one day from a dream that his wife has cheated on him, he flees – immediately, inexplicably – for Japan.

In Tokyo he discovers the travel writings of the great Japanese poet Basho. Suddenly, from Gilbert’s directionless crisis there emerges a purpose: a pilgrimage in the footsteps of the poet to see the moon rise over the pine islands of Matsushima.

Along the way he falls into step with another pilgrim: Yosa, a young Japanese student clutching a copy of The Complete Manual of Suicide. Together, Gilbert and Yosa travel across Basho’s disappearing Japan, one in search of his perfect ending and the other a new beginning.

Serene, playful and profound, The Pine Islands is a story of the transformations we seek and the ones we find along the way.

Read the opening pages of The Pine Islands below

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He’d dreamt that his wife had been cheating on him. Gilbert Silvester woke up distraught. Mathilda’s black hair lay spread out on the pillow next to him, tentacles of a malevolent pitch-black jellyfish. Thick strands of it gently stirred in time with her breathing, creeping towards him. He quietly got out of bed and went into the bathroom, where he stared aghast into the mirror. He left the house without eating breakfast. When he finished work that evening he still felt dumbfounded, almost numb. The dream hadn’t dissipated over the course of the day and hadn’t faded sufficiently for the inane expression ‘dreams are but shadows’ to be applicable. On the contrary, the night’s impressions had become steadily stronger, more conclusive. An unmistakable warning from his unconscious to his naive, unsuspecting ego.

He walked into the hallway, dropped his briefcase theatrically, and confronted his wife. She denied everything. This only confirmed his suspicions. Mathilda seemed different. Unusually fervent. Agitated. Ashamed. She accused him of slipping out early in the morning without saying goodbye. I. Was. Worried. How. Could. You. Endless accusations. A flimsy deflection tactic. As if the blame suddenly lay with him. She had gone too far. He wouldn’t allow it.

He couldn’t recall later on whether he had shouted at her (probably), struck her (surely not) or spat at her (well, really, a little spittle may very well have sprayed from his mouth while he was talking animatedly at her), he had at any rate gathered a few things together, taken his credit cards and his passport and left, walking along the pavement past the house, and when she didn’t come after him and didn’t call out his name, he carried on, somewhat slower at first and then faster, till he reached the next underground station, and disappeared down the steps, one might say in hindsight, as if sleepwalking. He travelled through the city and didn’t get out until he reached the airport.

He spent the night in Terminal B, uncomfortably sprawled across two metal chairs. He kept checking his smartphone. Mathilda hadn’t sent him any messages. His flight was leaving the next morning, the earliest intercontinental flight he could book at short notice.

In the plane en route to Tokyo he drank green tea, watched two samurai films and repeatedly reassured himself that he had not only done everything right, but that his actions had indeed been inevitable, were still inevitable, and would carry on being inevitable, not only according to his personal opinion, but according to world opinion.

He’d retreat. He wouldn’t insist on his rights. He’d make way, for whomever it was. Her boss, the head teacher, a grouchy macho kind of guy. The handsome adolescent who she was allegedly mentoring, a trainee teacher. Or one of those pushy women she teaches with. He was no match for a woman. With a man, time would potentially be on his side. He could wait and see how things developed, ride out the storm until she changed her mind. It stands to reason that the allure of what was forbidden would fade sooner or later. But up against another woman he didn’t stand a chance. Unfortunately, the dream hadn’t been completely clear on this point. Overall, however, the dream had been clear enough. Very clear. As if he had suspected it. He had essentially suspected it. For quite a while actually. Hadn’t she been in a remarkably good mood for the last few weeks? Downright cheerful? And markedly friendly towards him? A diplomatic kind of friendliness that had grown more and more unbearable as time went on, which would have become even more unbearable if he had known what was hiding behind it sooner. But this was how she had managed to lull him into a false sense of security for so long. And he had allowed himself to be lulled, a clear failure on his part. He’d dropped his guard, allowed himself to be disappointed, because his suspicion hadn’t been limitless.

Posted on April 9, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

Our post-Fleabag non-conformist library

The priest. The bassoon song called ‘Where’s Claire?’ The fox. The stolen sculpture. Claire’s hair. We could go on. But instead we’re going to go and Google Andrew Scott’s speech about love one more time.

If, like us, you’re suffering from Fleabag withdrawal already, you may be feeling bereft. But we have an amazing library of non-confirmists to help you through the time it takes for you to decide to watch it all again, from the beginning.

‘I’m alone. I’m a drinker. I’m a former artist. I’m a shrieker in bed. I’m the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh.’

‘Think BBC’s Fleabag set in Brooklyn’ Stylist

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When Chris Kraus, an unsuccessful artist pushing 40, spends an evening with a rogue academic named Dick, she falls madly and inexplicably in love, enlisting her husband in her haunted pursuit. Dick proposes a kind of game between them, but when he fails to answer their letters Chris continues alone, transforming an adolescent infatuation into a new form of philosophy.

Widely considered to be the most important feminist novel of the past two decades, I Love Dick is still essential reading; as relevant, fierce and funny as ever.

‘The most important book written about men and women written in the last century’ Guardian

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Ann-Marie is 23, her life has collapsed, and she’s blaming everyone but herself.

From neo-burlesque pop-up strip clubs, to ironic Little Mermaid-themed warehouse parties via ritual worship ceremonies summoning ancient power goddesses, disastrous one night stands with extravagantly unsuitable men, naked cleaning jobs, a forced appearance on Woman’s Hour and baby boomer house parties in Islington, Ann-Marie hurtles through London and life, urged on by legnedary feminist Stephanie, who is convinced that if she can save Ann-Marie she’ll rescue an entire generation from the curse of ironic detachment.

Fiercely clever and unapologetically wild, Eat My Heart Out is the satire for our narcissistic, hedonistic, post-post-feminist era.

Winner of the Betty Trask Prize

‘Dead smart and gloriously, mercifully, snort-out-loud hilarious’ Dazed

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Alison and Veronica meet amid the nocturnal glamour of 1980s New York: one is a former modelling sensation, stumbling away from the wreck of her career, the other an eccentric middle-aged proofreader with a meticulous eye. Over the next twenty years their friendship will encompass narcissism and tenderness, exploitation and self-sacrifice, love and mortality.

Moving between the glamorous and gritty ’80s, when beauty and style gave licence to excess, and the broken world of the decade’s survivors twenty years later, Veronica evokes the fragility and mystery of human relationships in a world rife with artificiality.

‘A sensitive, astute and uncompromising exploration of the beauty and ugliness of human relationships’ Observer

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It’s the tail-end of 1986 and Baby is the freshest-faced, starriest-eyed young homo in all of New York City, straight off the bus from closeted backwoods Wisconsin. Adeline is his rich-art-school-kid saviour with a bizarre transatlantic drawl and a spare bed.

The Future Won’t Be Long follows Baby and Adeline as they cling to each other for dear life through a decade of mad, bad New York life punctuated by the deaths of Warhol, Basquiat and Wojnarowicz and the forcible gentrification of the East Village. While Adeline develops into the artist she never really expected to become, Baby falls into a twilight zone of clubbing, ketamine and late-capitalistic sexual excess.

The Future Won’t Be Long is a sprawling, ecstatic elegy to the friendships that have the power to change – and save – our lives.

‘(A) druggy, sexy, filthy fictional tour of New York City at the twilight of the 20th century’ Metro

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Posted on April 8, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

Ruby Tandoh investigates ‘fake’ food

In her newsletter, Ruby Tandoh explores our ever-changing relationship with food. Most recently she has written about our attitudes to ‘fake’ food. Read her brilliant piece below.

Buy your copy of Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want with 10% off & free UK p&p

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Ruby Tandoh

Til we make it

There is nothing in food quite so dreaded as a fake – something very nearly, but necessarily not, the same as the thing it purports to be. The headlines simmer, seethe and slip away with a comforting regularity: fake meat, fake cheese, fake milk, fake blood, fake eggs, each threatening to disrupt the order of things, each raising the question of what is really real, what is really food. Soon, a full vote will be put before MEPs on whether to ban non-meat products from co-opting the language of meat – with ‘steak’, ‘burger’ and ‘sausage’ to become the preserve of meat-containing products. The buzz incites a panic, the panic incites a buzz, and all the while we continue to eat the same things that we have always eaten: fried chicken becomes fried jackfruit, dairy milk is replaced with oat, cheese is now made of cashews. These innovations fill in the culinary gaps.

Ancient almond milk

Culinary trickery has existed for as long as there have been foods to fake. In medieval England, at a time when Lent brought with it a prohibition on meat, dairy and egg, clever cooks created elaborate substitutes for their favourite non-Lenten foods. Pike and salmon meats (fish was allowed during Lent) were minced and layered to approximate the marbling of flesh and fat in a joint of pork. Gingerbread was crushed, toasted and plastered over the outside of the ‘roast’ – a canny replication of the crisping and browning of roasted meat. Chopped almonds and grapes created a fake minced meat. Almond milk, which feels so succinctly of the moment that it’s hard to imagine it outside of this little pocket of the early 21st century, was a Lenten staple, too. One 13th century French recipe instructs the cook in the art of making almond milk at home. “Take peeled almonds, crush very well in a mortar, steep in water boiled and cooled to lukewarm, strain through cheesecloth and boil your almond milk on a few coals for an instant or two.” This almond milk could be put to good use in blank mang, for which capons were boiled in almond milk with rice, lard, sugar and salt.

Meanwhile, some 5000 miles away in Song Dynasty China, Buddhist cooks created mock meat, fanghun, dishes that not only recreated the proteinous substance of meat dishes, but imitated the texture and flavour of meat, too. Mushrooms, rich with umami flavour, were one of the ingredients used to mimic meat’s richness and savoury heft. Soy, high in protein and endlessly versatile, could be boiled, skimmed, layered, pressed, pushed and squeezed into shape, taking whatever fleshy form a cook might dream of. Wheat, when stripped of its starch and bran, became dense, glutinous and almost confrontationally chewy, as pleasingly hearty as meat.

The effect of food

Defined by what they are not, these foods nonetheless conform as closely as possible to the shapes, textures and flavours of the meats they’re designed to supersede. They are renderings of meat, cheese, eggs, fish or milk, sometimes faithful to the original, other times more gestural in their similarity, but always created with that existing culinary vocabulary in mind. “There isn’t always an exact equivalent for a word or phrase: it’s the effect of it that matters,” poet and translator George Szirtes has observed. The effect of easy comfort from a sausage sandwich. The effect of planting a joint of meat in the middle of a table to a chorus of ‘oooohs’ and ‘aaaahs’. The effect of greasy fingers and fast food. The tireless, hungry innovation of people bending the culinary rules.

Of course, where there’s change, there is resistance. In the case of today’s daring food fakery, the backlash has been multifaceted, commentators citing different reasons why this, or that, act of fakery is a fake too far, insistent that we should return to well-worn grooves of tradition. “If we surrender the definition of meat,” food writer Joanna Blythman has written, “we’re blurring a critical division between real food, as nature made it, and processed food, as redesigned in the lab. We traduce the very meaning of ‘meat’ by reducing it to disembodied components that can be tinkered with.” In France, a law has banned producers from labelling meat-free products as bacon, sausages or mince. Chef and food writer J. Kenji Lopéz-Alt once wrote of fake meat that it cannot match the flavour of animal products. “My question is,” he muses, “why even bother?”

Preserving the sense of a food

To bother suggests an effort or an unsettling, a ruffling of feathers, a disturbance amidst the calm. But to create a fake is the opposite of this kind of disruption: to fake is to smooth and to blend, to press the edges of something into the form of something else, to fit something novel into the shape of something old, moving seamlessly into a world that is both entirely new and entirely familiar. Food fakery is not a revolutionary but a reactionary process: a way of adapting to the pressures of a changing culinary landscape while holding tight to the traditions, rituals and conventions that unite disparate foods in a common cuisine, pull separate mouths closer in a moment of communion. As food historian and writer Massimo Montanari has commented, this is “the capacity of food systems to evolve and change, while at the same time reaffirming their own identity, regenerating themselves thanks to external add-ons, while assimilating the unknown.” It is the uncanny process of invoking sameness from strange parts.

A fake food is a synonym, then, or perhaps a translation: preserving the sense of a food, holding its place in the fabric of our social, nutritive and ritual lives while constructing it from different constituent parts, different ingredients, different letters. “The rules of the menu are not in themselves more or less trivial than the rules of verse to which a poet submits,” wrote anthropologist Mary Douglas. Foods are not simply vessels for nutrients, nor even isolated symbolic units (fecund pomegranate, phallic sausage). They are interconnected, interdependent, shifting nodes of meaning, bound within a system – a ‘culinary grammar’, as Montanari put it – that informs the way that we consume. When one fundamental unit is removed, we fill that space with approximations of a flavour, of a feeling.

Meat as a muse

With this in mind, it’s unsurprising that meat should be such a powerful muse for food fakery. Meat, in the western European and North American culinary traditions, at least, doesn’t just mean the flesh of animals. It means the ritual of the summer barbecue; Thanksgiving turkey, slaughter and sacrifice; the supremacy of steak. Our culinary grammar provides the framework for everything from the slaughter of the lamb to the snapping of wishbones. Even when meat is cheap and irreverent – thrown at lightning speed from hotplate to bun in a McDonald’s kitchen – it still contains the traces of this grammatical hierarchy: placing hamburger at the centre and relegating bun, lettuce, cheese and sauce to adjectival status. Fries and drink are, of course, on the side. What happens, then, when we no longer eat meat? What fills this conspicuously empty space in a culinary grammar that has meat as its organising principle?

“Meatless Bologna, Meatless Fried Chicken, Meatless Sizzle Burgers, Meatless Swiss Steak and Meatless Sizzle Franks,” Whitny Braun reminisces, writing about her vegetarian Adventist upbringing in an article for the Huffington Post. The Seventh Day Adventist Church was the unlikely crucible for the 20th century fake meat market. Seventh Day Adventist companies met their market in the middle, finding freedom from within restriction. They communicated old ideas with a new culinary language, presenting dutiful Adventists not with unfamiliar foods, but with clever replicas of the hotdogs and burgers that furnished the gastronomic landscape of the mid-20th century America they inhabited. Using peanuts, wheat protein and soy, companies such as Worthington Foods and the Battle Creek Food Company (founded by one of the Kellogg brothers), translated the culinary zeitgeist into a permissible, vegetarian form. These clunky meat facsimiles might seem naive to the modern palate, but their logic carries through even today in the food labs of Silicon valley. The multimillion dollar fake meat innovators may trade in the rhetoric of progress and difference, but the pioneering meat-free products they sell are necessarily, comfortingly familiar.

A new status quo

None of this is to say that there isn’t space for genuine change in the way we eat. Languages slip and shift, and new spaces for understanding open up where old orthodoxies recede. Montanari, discussing our incredible flexibility in the face of uncertain food supplies, explains that gnocchi – now definitionally a potato dumpling – had been for many hundreds of years, until the potato arrived in Europe from the Americas, “made only with flour and breadcrumbs”. Similarly, it wasn’t until explorers brought corn back from their travels to the New World that polenta became the food that we might recognise today. “In ancient Rome it had been made with spelt, in the medieval period with millet and other grains… The acceptance of the new product was all the more persuasive when it was shown to be adaptable to traditional usage.” These are adaptations which have so successfully supplanted their forebears that they have not only provided alternative ways of filling a food niche, but have created a new status quo.

A common refrain from critics of such fakery is that perhaps, for example, roasted carrots with tahini should take the place of a turkey crown, rather than a mock turkey made ingeniously of mycoproteins. “Seriously though,” writes journalist Suzanne Moore, on the topic of the ‘bleeding’ meat-free burger, “if you go anywhere where the cuisine is vegetarian (such as most of south India) this bizarre need to replicate the bodily fluids of animals seems strange.” But as Chitra Agrawal, author of Vibrant India, has noted, “for many Indian vegetarians, I don’t think a meat substitute would even register since meat was never a reference point to begin with.”

Agrawal’s comment highlights the peculiar forgetfulness of the Western culinary tradition – the wilful amnesia about our engrained culinary reference points, our embedment within a time and place and genealogy of food. We cling onto the sense that we might move effortlessly across cuisines, across languages, master of all yet allegedly native to none – something to which Mary Douglas alluded when she wrote of the impossibility of a “precoded, panhuman message in the language of food”. We believe that we can revel in the strangeness of new culinary languages. That may be so, but if we do so, we often do so alone, untranslated, unintelligible, detached from the communicative, social, shared conventions of eating to which we belong.

Everything is new, and the same

Food on the tongue (lingua, the root of language) connects us not just to a feeder, but to a culture and a history. “Eating is language that speaks of the nuances of what we are. Eating is making alive the various and variegated conjugations of our lives,” writes Eddy Alegre in Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food. When one vital piece of vocabulary is no longer available to us, we speak in translation. We chew up old concepts, digesting them into something that works for us today, in this place, in this society – not a destruction, but a recreation. Cooking is often described as a creative process: the creation of something novel from simple components, the ability to magic difference from a shopping basket of the same old. But creative cooking is also the inverse of this process: creating something entirely familiar from new ingredients, new processes, new dictates. Everything is new, and the same as it has always been. A fake burger, with fake cheese, with a fake milkshake, in a real mouth, in a real body, in a real, shared culinary world. We dance with the lightest of feet around the rules that we have resolved to follow, faking it again, and again, and again, until we make it.

Buy your copy of Eat Up: Food, Appetite and Eating What You Want with 10% off & free UK p&p

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Posted on March 28, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

Postscript: Vikram Paralkar on Night Theatre

‘I read this book in a single addictive sitting. It will stay with me for a long time’ Jeet Thayil

‘By the time I reached its smashing final line, I was hoping Paralkar would resurrect the dead for a sequel’ The Hindu

As dusk approaches, a surgeon goes about closing up his dilapidated clinic in rural India, when he is visited by a family – a teacher, his wife and their son. Victims of a senseless attack, they reveal to the surgeon wounds that they could not possibly have survived – and which the surgeon must mend before sunrise so that they may return to life.

Vikram Paralkar tells us the story behind Night Theatre.

I started writing Night Theatre with two questions in mind: What obligations does a doctor have towards a patient who lays an impossible task at his feet? And how does a moral person conduct himself within a society that tries to corrupt him at every turn? These issues had been occupying me for some time, and I was looking for a way to coax them into literary form.

The seeds of Night Theatre were sown a decade earlier, in 2003, when I was in the final year of medical college in India. One of our mandatory rotations was in a tiny government clinic a few hours from Mumbai. A classmate and I were posted there together, but the classmate, having found some means of bribing his way to a completion certificate, never materialised. I, on the other hand, presented myself to the village, only to learn that the senior doctor stationed there was leaving the next afternoon on a long vacation. And so it happened that a sapling of a medical student, green with little more than textbook knowledge, was stranded alone in an isolated clinic.

Nothing untoward happened during my brief tenure there, if only because the gods were kind enough to preserve the health of the villagers during those weeks, and keep at bay any illnesses that my rudimentary skills could not tackle. But the anxiety of my first night was an experience qualitatively different from any I had previously known. It was the realisation that the lives of others might, at any moment, be thrust into my hands. Incompetence and failure, which, until that moment, could only result in poor examination grades, would now be measured in breath and blood.

I’ve always had an affinity for the uncanny and the absurd, and so, when the opportunity came for me to smuggle the emotional core of my own experience into fiction, I reached for the most absurd task I could place before my protagonist, a cynical but moral surgeon. If breath and blood were to be at stake, then perhaps the most impossible patient would be one who possessed neither. That was how the plot outline of Night Theatre took form. A surgeon in a village clinic, brought to grief by government corruption, would be visited one night by the dead, who would beg him to mend their wounds so they could return to life at dawn.

Night Theatre unfolds over the hours of one night and the morning that follows. To the reader who chooses to spend any time at all within its pages: much gratitude and affection.

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Find out more about Night Theatre

Posted on March 5, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

WAH x Serpent’s Tail for International Women’s Day 2019

We’re so excited to be teaming up with London beauty powerhouse WAH NAILS to celebrate International Women’s Day 2019 with an in-salon feminist library and free lunchtime event with author Alex Holder.

This week, head down to the WAH Nails salon in Soho and browse a library of ten of our incredible women writers while you wait for your appointment. Tag us & WAH in your insta stories/tweets to be in with a chance of winning books.

On Friday 8^th March at 1pm, Alex Holder will hold a free event discussing her new book Open Up, and the power of talking about money. Open Up (published Thursday 7^th March) calls for us to radically improve our finances by talking about money with friends, family and colleagues. WAH Nails is located at 4 Peter Street, Soho, London, W1F 0AD.

The WAH Feminist Library is made up a combination of recent and classic titles by women writers. The library includes cult autofiction I Love Dick by Chris Kraus, National Book Award finalist Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado, Sunday Times Bestselling food manifesto Eat Up by Ruby Tandoh and the classic The Piano Teacher by Nobel winner Elfriede Jelinek.

Follow the action on Twitter + Instagram: @serpentstail @WAHNAILS #WAHfeministlibrary #IWD19

Shop the collection with 10% off + free UK p&p

Astragal by Albertine Sarrazin (Serpent’s Tail Classics)

Eat My Heart Out by Zoe Pilger

I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek (Serpent’s Tail Classics)

Virtuoso by Yelena Moskovich

The Word for Woman is Wilderness by Abi Andrews

Eat Up! by Ruby Tandoh

Open Up by Alex Holder

Quicksand & Passing by Nella Larsen (Serpent’s Tail Classic)

Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

Posted on February 19, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

Q&A with Angela Steidele, author of Gentleman Jack

Anne Lister was a Yorkshire heiress, an intrepid world traveller and a proud lesbian during a time when it was difficult simply to be female. She chose to remain unmarried, dressed all in black and spoke openly of her lack of interest in men. As daring as Don Juan and as passionate as Heathcliff, Anne would not be constrained by the mores of Regency society.

Anne’s diaries lay hidden for many years, before scholars were brave enough to crack their code. Her erotic confessions and lively letters tell the story of an extraordinary woman. In this groundbreaking new book, celebrated author Angela Steidele gives a fresh perspective on the life of a cult historical figure. She tells us more about what inspired her to write Lister’s biography.

You’ve written several books about LGBTQ+ lives in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but what drew you to tell Anne Lister’s story?

Anne’s explicit language of sex. She seduced me to write her biography by literally duplicating her life and loves in her diary.

Readers are surprised by how bold Anne was to live her life the way she did at that time. Did you encounter other LGBT+ people in your research who were just as brave, or was Anne a real one-off?

Anne’s contemporaries Adele Schopenhauer (Arthur’s sister) and Sibylle Mertens lived in Bonn and Rome just as openly as Anne Lister and Ann Walker did in Halifax. Catharina Margaretha Linck (1686–1721) wore men’s clothing, worked as a prophet, a soldier and a craftsman and had many affairs with other women, using a leather dildo. She married the same woman twice, first protestant, then catholic. When they arranged to marry for a third time (again protestant), Linck was betrayed by her mother-in-law. She was arrested and beheaded for committing the crime of sodomy. Unfortunately my biographies on all these women are not yet translated into English.

If Anne were still alive, what one question would you want to ask her?

Would you please give me lessons in Greek?

Do you think Anne would have been flattered with being the first recipient of a rainbow edged blue plaque in the UK?

Publicly she would give no comment. In her diaries she would detest it – and feel some pride at the same time.

Are you working on your next project? Can you tell us a little about it?

After Gentleman Jack I published a ‘making-of’, called (in German) Travelling in Time. Four women, two centuries, one way. It covers Anne Lister’s and Ann Walker’s daring journey to Russia and the Caucasus in more detail, mirrored by the adventures I had, together with my wife, when travelling in their footsteps. Currently I am writing a Poetics of Biography. All three books together will form a trilogy on biographical writing (Biography – Reflection – Theory).

What does LGBTQ+ History Month mean to you? Do you do anything to celebrate?

I devote not only a month, but half of my life to LGBTQ+ history. This year I will come to London to present Gentleman Jack at the British Library (Feb 21) and at Gay’s the Word (March 1).

Posted on February 15, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

Casey Gerald’s Top 5 LGBT+ Books

To celebrate LGBT History month we asked Casey Gerald, author of acclaimed memoir There Will Be No Miracles Here to share his top 5 LGBT+ books.

What are your favourites? Let us know on Twitter, Instagram & Facebook

Buy your copy of The Will Be No Miracles Here with 10% off + free UK p&p

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

I read it when I was twenty-four … there was no turning back after this line: “People can’t, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Perhaps the best queer novel I’ve ever read. The relationship between Celie and Shug Avery is so natural and sublime. Toward the end Celie and Mr.__ have a conversation about their un-catchable lover, which stuns Celie (for reasons that will be clear if you read the novel): “Love can’t be halted just cause some peoples moan and groan. It don’t surprise me you love Shug Avery, he say. I have love Shug Avery all my life.”

Cruising Utopia by Jose Esteban Munoz

I was reading this book when I learned that a dear friend had taken his life, and Munoz’s work helped me see my way through that awful period. It also taught me what my own book, as a work of queer art, could do. He writes: “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on…concrete possibility for another world.

Our Lady of the Flowers by Jean Genet

Whenever I fear I’m crossing a line in my life or work, I look to Genet and remember that he has blasted the lines away. Here is the narrator of Our Lady, speaking of a former love interest: “If I continue, he will rise up, become erect, and penetrate me so deeply that I shall be marked with stigmata.” Genet is the master of making the profane sacred.

Ceremonies by Essex Hemphill

Hemphill is a patron saint poet, of a generation of black gay American men devastated by the AIDS epidemic, whose work is as urgent and glorious now as it was during his life. American Wedding is my favorite poem of his: “Every time we kiss / we confirm the new world coming.”

Posted on February 14, 2019January 18, 2021 by Simon appleby

Open Up: The Power of Talking About Money: read the introduction

Ever struggled to say ‘no’ to an expensive dinner with friends? Found yourself unable to ask for a payrise even though you deserved it? Got stuck in an overdraft and felt too ashamed to tell anyone?

Open Up is an outspoken, warm and timely book that destigmatises the way we talk, think and feel about money. It’s full of conversations about money in everyday life – how we earn it, how we spend it and how it affects us. Whether learning from friends, being transparent with partners, finding community with colleagues or recognising what you’re worth, talking about money means letting go of shame, and creating a healthy relationship with your finances. Full of advice on everything from mindful spending to the freelance jump, this is a book that strips away the awkwardness, to help you find the power in talking about money.

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When I was terrible with money I talked about it. I complained about how far away payday was. I took pride in my reckless spending. I showed off to friends by withdrawing my last £20 from a cashpoint, then running into Tesco to buy two bottles of prosecco on my card before the bank realised I’d taken all my money out. I was proud of how useless I was. Despite buying into the idea that the more money someone has, the better their life is, I felt strangely comfortable being bad with it. ‘Reckless 20-something’ was a relatively uncomplicated character to play – I was that person, the one who could get their ass in gear to book a flight to Berlin but who never opened a bill. Maybe, because I knew I wasn’t earning the most money, I took refuge in bowing out of the competition and just being bad with money. There seemed less shame in staying broke than admitting money mattered.

There was a time when all my friends were open about money. When we were leaving university and trying to get our first jobs, we were all at the bottom of an imagined ladder and there was a pack mentality: us against the world. Sharing benefitted us all. In a couple of conversations we’d know what to expect salary-wise by industry and entry-level position, which for a graduate was pretty invaluable information. Then as we slowly peeled away from each other and into different industries, some of us earning more, some earning less, money became a shameful subject. Perhaps it’s because people can literally be placed in a pecking order of highest earner to lowest that we stopped sharing what we earned. No one wanted to feel that they were in a league table with their friends and subject themselves to that kind of direct comparison, so money became a subject to skirt around. The more complicated our lives got, the more it solidified into a taboo subject. As we moved forward as adults, we faced decisions about money on our own: how much salary to ask for, what was a normal amount to pay in rent and whether we could really afford to go to that hen do in Barcelona.

The idea that our salary and the money in our bank account defines us – that it represents our happiness, our power, our status, our popularity, our intelligence and our freedom – is a hugely popular idea that we are constantly encouraged to believe. It’s why we protect our salaries to such an extent; we’re warned that revealing our number might feel akin to public masturbation or broadcasting a therapy session, that if you spoke about your salary, people would know you too intimately. It was something I completely bought into as a young adult, yet as I’ve got older I’ve realised that salary isn’t as defining as I first thought. That number doesn’t indicate everything; it’s not your happiness or your popularity or any of those other identifiers. In fact, I’ve seen people who earn less be happier than people who earn more. I’ve learned to see that there are many currencies in life other than money: love, health, time, passion, purpose and freedom. Now I can’t help but see how often we sacrifice the other currencies in pursuit of the only one we recognise to the decimal point – money.

The social code dictating that we shouldn’t talk about money was invented and perpetuated by the richest of society and trickled down to the rest of us; not talking about money is a privilege of the wealthy. For those who inherit wealth, discussions about money serve no purpose: their funds are secure, they don’t need to talk about it. In contrast, if you’re not rich then discussing money becomes critical to your survival: ‘Where are the cheapest places to buy food?’ ‘Where are the affordable places to live?’ Equally, if you’re trying to make it in a new country, or a new city far away from your home town – in New York, or London, or Paris – you are going to want to discuss how the hell people afford rent. If you’re a woman and suspect you’re being paid less than your male colleagues, the only way you’re going to find out is by asking. If you’re a person of colour and think you’re being charged more for your insurance, you’re going to want to make it known. If you can’t afford to eat at that restaurant you are going to have to tell your friends.

We’ve basically allowed privileged people to determine how we talk about money. And as a result, we’re stuck in a place where talking about what we earn, spend and save is just too awkward. There is seemingly too much at stake to talk about money with any level of earnestness; everyone is too scared of embarrassing anyone else and too scared of feeling any shame themselves. Also, we don’t know how to talk about it. We haven’t developed the vocabulary. How do you tell your mum you’ve got into more debt than you can handle? Why does sharing a money trouble sometimes feel like a request for funds when what you really need is an ear and some advice? Shame feels so intrinsically tied to money. But shame is an emotion we harbour in secret, and so it’s possible that if we were more open about money it wouldn’t be allowed to fester to such a degree.

I was a sell-out. For years I worked in advertising, selling beer, junk food and clothes on credit to people who couldn’t afford them. My job lacked purpose. It left me with little time to myself, and I often went years not exercising, but it did pay me a decent salary. Weirdly I feel more shame admitting I had money than I ever did about not having it. Talking about money when you have it feels crass and materialistic, like you’re ‘showing off ’, or suggesting that you’re better than someone else – two things my Northern upbringing taught me to scorn. I still feel uncomfortable admitting I’m not in my overdraft, and I sometimes miss the student camaraderie of all being in the same skint boat, even though I appreciate I’m lucky.

I can think of so many conversations with friends lately that have felt inauthentic because money-related parts of the story were missing. Just because I’m no longer a skint student doesn’t mean I don’t have money issues I need to work through. We all do. When I quit my full-time job to go freelance I didn’t really talk to friends about it, because to elicit any real advice I’d have had to talk actual figures. I’m tired of skirting around the subject of money with people I love and trust. It feels ridiculous that I’ve accompanied a friend to a sexual health clinic but I have no idea how she bought a flat in London.

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