An Idea – An Extract from Dogtooth Chronicals
AN IDEA Wolfgang, Dreamscape Beneath my feet the cold ground is hardened. There were ridges ploughed into the Earth long ago, when it was soft and giving. Now it is as concrete, desperate to trip me and crunch on my bones. I see a figure in the distance. I pray a gentleman, stood solitary in...
Writer’s Block…
WRITER’S BLOCK Roxanne Ratcliffe, Next to Nowhere The empty white page bleeds to an empty white world. I’m walking and yet there’s nothing. The pale sky merges to the pale snowy landscape, except there is no landscape, no trees, no shapes. Just an expanse of white page, blank. Maybe here I am truly lost. Spinning...
First Look: The Greater Thief
The day the man at the end of the road got shot was a fairy tale day. It was a day I’d spent in another world wondering if my prince would trot round the corner and along the grisly north London street on a white horse. I thought it all through thoroughly, as I sat...
Books / Contemporary Art / ebooks / Independent film / Indie publishing / Literature / Music / Short Films / UK
I Write the Bee Sides…
Trawling junk shops, getting covered in chalk & charcoal, scavenging for a drum kit. These are probably not the usual activities of someone preparing for a book launch. But with seismic changes afoot (that’s right I used the word seismic), the literary world is throwing the traditional tweed manual for correct behaviour out of the...
Review of “The Weeping Empress”
A fantasy epic set in an alternative universe alongside (or crooked) to ours, Sadie Forsythe illustrates the journey of a young woman called Chiyo and her relationship with violence and destiny. Chiyo is from our world, we assume, had a normal life with a husband and young child but is forced to survive in a...
Dogtooth Chronicals – A love affair between shaggy dogs and improper vowels
“If the apocalypse comes tomorrow, I’ll meet you in the pub.” On the eve of waiting for the delivery of 500 paperback copies of my debut novel, I ponder how many people will tell me I’ve a typo in the title. The trouble with self-publishing is the sceptics are looking for signs of shoddy, amateur...
The Ninth Orphan by James and Lance Morcan
If you’re a fan of international conspiracy thrillers in the vein of James Bond and James Bourne – and you like your action fast and furious – this latest offering from father and son writing team, James and Lance Morcan, is guaranteed not to disappoint. The first of a trilogy, The Ninth Orphan follows the...
The Literary Travelogue, Reinvented
No two industries have been more disrupted by the internet than travel and publishing. We travel more independently now, but no more wisely. We read more widely, but no more deeply, because most of what is published online is shallow or inherited from print. There are exceptions, of course, but what could have been a...
Review: The Metropolis Organism by Frank Vitale
The metaphor of the city as organic matter is by no means a new one. In ancient Greece, Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, compared classical Athens to a tangle of wool with the insistence that all imperfections, ‘knots’, ‘snarls’ and ‘burs’ be teased out. An organic, corporeal depiction of society and its structure was further perpetuated by the...
