Ampersand

Recently, Galway’s wonderful Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop tweeted a picture of a display of their favourite indie books, and we were delighted to see plenty of And Other Stories books among their number. It made us realise we’d been neglecting what must be one of Ireland’s best bookshops, so we promptly got in touch to remedy the situation. Although we couldn’t cross the Irish Sea to go in person, it feels like we know them a lot better now, thanks to these excellent responses from the whole team (read to the end for the bonus dog)!

And Other Stories: What do you think is special about Charlie Byrne’s?

Charlie Byrne’s Booksellers: That is hard to say, although if we were pushed we would point to our sense of community and our wish to provide a cultural space as well as a place to buy books. We currently operate six book-clubs, three for adults and three for children, a weekly Saturday morning Storytime with Michaela and we have on average a book launch a week by local or national writers.

What we also think makes us special is our range and mix of books, with over a 100,000 new, discounted and second-hand books in store. We buy books from all over the world so there’s always plenty to choose from!

AOS: If money was no object, what changes would you make to your bookshop?

CBB: Vinny maintains that if money was no object he would love us to have every Irish title published anywhere in the world that is still in print, so that we can truly call ourselves THE national bookshop. For Clíona, Mike and John we would love to expand on that and say we would love to have every independent publisher’s book in store. Again, affirming us as the best independent bookshop out there.

AOS: How / why did you get into bookselling?

CBB: Well, for Charlie it all started with a love of books and a book cart 29 years ago. At that time, he was working as an archaeologist before packing it in and setting up a cart at a Saturday market in Galway City. Since then Charlie has moved shop/base twice in Galway before finally settling in our current home in the Corn Store Mall on Middle Street, where we hope to stay for many years to come.

As for the rest of us, well that is an easy question, we got into bookselling as we just love books!

AOS: What’s the funniest thing you ever heard anyone say in the shop?

CBB: Not sure if we can answer that given some of the colourful and funny things we have heard over the years. But Vinny remembers a customer who came in looking to sell or at least get the value of a Cliff Richard signature to which Vinny responded he wouldn’t really know much about the value of signatures only that Neil Armstrong’s signature is said to be worth a huge amount. The guy, obviously unhappy with this, preceded to exclaim to the whole store ‘sure them f#ckers were never on the moon!’ before storming off with his Cliff Richard signature.

AOS: What’s your favourite And Other Stories book?

CBB: Tough question! But we will go with Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy (tr. Tim Parks). Tomás says it is a gentle and atmospheric book. The emotions are subtly expressed, and Eve’s interest in Frederique is similar to the relationship between Sis and Unn in Tarjei Vesaas’ The Ice Palace. It takes the female friendships found in Enid Blyton’s school stories or shoujo-ai manga, and explores the ambiguities found in them. The prose is sparse and delicate, with secrets hidden between each line.

AOS: What book published in the last year do our readers need to get their hands on?

CBB: For Noreen, Michaela and Charlie it’s ITHACA by our old friend Alan McMonagle; for Mike and Emily The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers edited by Sinéad Gleeson; Vinny goes for The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow by Danny Denton; Alan goes for Byung-Chul Han’s Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism & the New Technologies of Power; and finally the wonderful Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy for Tomás and Clíona.

AOS: What would be your desert island book?

CBB: The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth (tr. Michael Hofmann) for Mike; Michaela it’s The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov; Charlie picks Mike McCormack’s instant classic Solar Bones; Vinny opts for the Collected Prose of Samuel Beckett; The Unwomanly Face of War by Svetlana Alexievich for Clíona; Catch 22 by Joseph Heller for Brendan; Noreen picks the beautiful memoir Woodbrook by David Thomson and the classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for Tomás.

Bonus dog pic:

Many readers will know that we’re a UK-based publisher with tenacious tentacles stretching across the Atlantic to bring our books to US readers via our ever-inspiring stateside distributors Consortium. Well, Consortium are based in Minneapolis, a city that’s become a real literary hub over the last few decades. Not only is it home to Coffee House Press (with whom we’ll be publishing Alia Trabucco Zerán’s The Remainder in October 2018) and Graywolf Press, it’s also the location of the wonderful indie press Milkweed Editions - based at Open Book, the largest literary arts centre in the US. They share the building with Milkweed Books, an excellent, indie-focused bookstore. We wanted to find out a bit more, so we caught up with bookseller Daley Farr to ask some essential bibliophile questions:

And Other Stories: What do you think is special about Milkweed Books? Daley Farr: Bookstore manager Hans and I joked recently that “all killer no filler” is our defining philosophy, but it is a little bit true––all four staff members participate in buying for our very small store, so we surround ourselves with books we love and books we want to read. For us, this means that our inventory leans heavily in favor of small and independent presses, along with books that are pretty, weird, and hard to find. But instead of a shop that feels arty and alienating, I think we have done exceptionally well creating a space that balances curated inventory with old school customer service. We all read widely and are committed to making the store an inviting place where anyone can ask questions and receive excellent, personalized help, with no judgement. And I’m proud of our prolific shelftalker habit––in any genre, in any section of the store, you can find something we are eager to share with our customers.

AOS: If money was no object, what changes would you make to your bookshop? DF: More shelves! And custom display tables. The store was a little more gallery-like when we first opened, and now that we have grown into the space and understand it better, I long for some proper fancy bookstore fixtures. I don’t want it to be bigger, I don’t want our own coffee shop, we have a big event space upstairs—I just want to display and sell more books!

AOS: How / why did you get into bookselling? DF: Mine is a pretty classic trajectory: I was an English major who worked as barista for a long, long time, until I took an internship with Milkweed Editions. While I was there, I started working author events at Magers & Quinn across town, and when Milkweed was just about to open the bookstore, Hans brought me onboard. For me, it’s a humble, fundamentally egalitarian profession based on sharing ideas and good language with other people, making space for what is seen elsewhere as weird or marginal, and allowing for radical possibility. How could I resist? I’m grateful every day to be part of the bookselling tradition.

AOS: What’s the funniest thing you ever heard anyone say in the shop? Celia: Clearly the woman who called proposing to have a date in the bookstore and asked how much erotica we carry!!! (the answer is none) Berit: Anything any of us says. We are four very funny people with very different senses of humor. Daley: And we all love each other very much and constantly laugh and bicker about everything

AOS: What’s your favourite And Other Stories book? DF: We are proud of that [Yuri Herrera’s] Signs Preceding the End of the World is one of our bestsellers. Hans really liked [Nicola Pugliese’s] Malacqua recently, and I just fell in love with Ann Quin [The Unmapped Country]. Brother in Ice [by Alicia Kopf] is up next in my reading pile! And if some mild cheating is allowed since you publish these books abroad but not stateside, we also love [Patty Yumi Cottrell’s] Sorry to Disrupt the Peace and [Cristina Rivera Garza’s] The Iliac Crest.

AOS: What book published in the last year do our readers need to get their hands on? DF: Though I Get Home by YZ Chin from Feminist Press. Really sharp, connected stories about imperialism, ghosts, KFC, political unrest, storytelling itself. I have been evangelizing about it lately. It’s out in April! And to speak for the whole Milkweed Books staff, Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith (Graywolf) and Nature Poem by Tommy Pico (Tin House) are two of the most brilliant and vital books of the last year.

If you’re not familiar with the ReadWomen hashtag and Twitter account, do yourself a favour and look them up.

Founded in 2014 by author Joanna Walsh as a catalyst to get people thinking more carefully about their reading habits, it sparked a worldwide literary conversation that’s still going on.

It was one of a sequence of prompts that led us to embark on our Year of Publishing Women in 2018, and it’s the inspiration behind our new Reading Women book club, which you can find more information about on our website here.

We asked the current team behind the @ReadWomen Twitter account to tell us a few of the books they’re looking forward to this year (all written by women of course). So if you want some great feminist reading inspiration, read on!

Joanna Walsh (@badaude), founder and author of Worlds from the Word’s End

I'm looking forward to reading A Handbook of Disappointed Fate by US poet Anne Boyer. She's a passionate and political lyric essayist and these meditations on her cancer treatment are sure to be witty, inventive, scalpel-sharp, and purely extraordinary.

Alexia Richardson (@lillie_langtry), contributor and translator

I loved Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, so I'm delighted she has a new book coming out in April and focusing on a female character from Homer's Odyssey: Circe.

Sian Norris (@sianushka), co-editor and writer

In the latest instalment of our almost-monthly slot, we talk to the excellent Jo from Pages of Hackney, a tiny bookshop in North-East London that's developed a great reputation for their events series and their work with the local community, since opening around ten years ago.

And Other Stories: What do you think is special about Pages of Hackney?

Pages of Hackney: Opened almost 10 years ago, Pages of Hackney is a small bookshop on the Lower Clapton Road selling an eclectic mix of books in the areas of literary fiction, politics, feminism, essays and life writing as well as psychology, nature writing, music and children’s books. Our priority is to be a friendly, welcoming community bookshop that feels accessible and inclusive: we want each customer to feel that the bookshop is for them and we do our best to give them individually as much time and thought as we can. It’s also important to us to support the issues and authors we believe in and to give a platform to marginalised voices in publishing. We run a diverse programme of author events and a monthly book group as well as providing book stalls at various public lectures across the city every week. We’re pretty busy. Staff wise, we are a close-knit team of three: Eleanor the owner, Jo the Manager and Ollie our bookseller/marketing guru. We have complementary yet diverse interests and aim to cover most subject areas between us.

AOS: If money was no object, what changes would you make to your bookshop?

PoH: I would make it bigger, with more sofas. And maybe a coffee machine, with someone to make the coffee. Oh and another member of staff and another till so we could serve two people at once and I could have a colleague to chat to!

AOS: How / why did you get into bookselling?

PoH: (Jo, Manager) I’ve worked in bookselling ever since I graduated. My first job after university was working in the unpacking room at Waterstones Norwich, which was a bit like opening presents all day, every day, on minimum wage. I graduated to the shop floor and then moved to London Piccadilly and Gower Street branches. Eventually I got a job in illustrated publishing where I worked for several years. After a sabbatical in Berlin I returned to Hackney and was lucky to get a job at Pages. Returning to bookselling felt to me like coming home and managing an independent bookshop is hard work but a dream job. I really enjoy the daily contact with customers and the part the shop plays in the local community. The shop’s owner, Eleanor is a really supportive boss with great business sense and she gives me autonomy to buy the books I believe in and feel are right for the shop. And I don't have to sell celebrity biographies! Programming literary events is a particular highlight, I love to be in a room of people enjoying an event I’ve set up and coordinated - especially the Q&A when the audience ask amazingly insightful questions, at times like those its hard to imagine a more fulfilling job. 

AOS: What’s the funniest thing you ever heard anyone say in the shop?

PoH: “Has Anne Frank written anything else?”

AOS: What’s your favourite And Other Stories book?

PoH: There are so many. I’m a huge Deborah Levy fan so Black Vodka and Swimming Home are my absolute favourites but I also loved Michelle Tea’s Black Wave and was bowled over by [Susana Moreira Marques’s] Now and at the Hour of Our Death. Oh and Yuri Herrera’s books of course. I’m super excited for your Year of Publishing Women in 2018!

AOS: What book published in the last year do our readers need to get their hands on?

PoH: Proxies by poet Brian Blanchfield (Picador), recommended to me by a fellow bookseller, is an outstanding memoir that was written with no access to external sources so relies on memory, estimation and personal insights. It is varied, accomplished and startling in its vulnerability.

AOS: What would be your desert island book?

On being a Male Book Publicist

Adam Howard is Publicist at independent publisher Scribe UK, working on media and marketing campaigns for books such as Universal Harvester by John Darnielle, Destined for War by Graham Allison and A World of Three Zeroes by Muhammad Yunus. He provides the most recent installment in our monthly series of insights into the publishing industry.

I’ve thought about it a lot and can’t for the life of me figure out why the vast majority of publicists in publishing are ladies. When I began my former job as events coordinator at Foyles and played host to a meeting of the networking group Publishers’ Publicity Circle (PPC) for the first time, I stood at the back of the auditorium and marvelled at the male-to-female ratio of people in the room — you can, at most meetings, count the number of men on one hand. I’ve always worked in jobs in creative industries that skewed towards women majorities and even went to university that, as rumour had it at the time, was 80% women and gay men, but I’d never realised quite how tilted the scales were in this particular area of the industry until I began working in it.

Most of my role as a publicist involves talking to editors, journalists, radio producers and bloggers, basically trying to convince them (begging, pleading) to say something nice about a book so that we can sell some more copies of it. Or, I'll be talking to bookshops, festivals and event programmers, convincing them that having my author talk about their book will draw a crowd. I'm lucky, I think, in that the quality of Scribe's list is exceptional, so it's easy to be passionate about the books I work on and I'm fulfilled, work-wise, by drumming up that passion in others.

Day-to-day, you don't interact very much with other publicists, but when you do it's rarely antagonistic — while technically we're all rivals competing for column inches and airtime, the mode of the industry is generally friendly and collaborative. But because your work is often isolated from others' it's only on occasions where large volumes of publicists come together — PPC meetings, conferences, festivals — that I’ll find myself being one of a only a handful of my gender in the room. It’s got to the point that I feel an automatic affinity when I meet another male publicist — our eyes will meet across the room and I’ll think to myself: ‘Is the fact that we’re both dudes enough to go on to start a conversation?’ But in the end I usually won’t because a) I’m pretty shy for a publicist and b) what if he wants to talk about football or something? I’m really not one to gravitate towards other men socially anyway. Growing up almost all my friends with girls, and now as an adult there’s at least a 50/50 split. I draw inspiration in both my social and professional spheres from the inspiring women around me – the amazing women I work with at Scribe and the women writers and musicians that I grew up reading and listening to — there has never and will never be an issue with me being the only man in the room.

My point, then, is we’re a rare breed, the Male Publicist — and that makes for a somewhat unique experience. Generally speaking, if you’re a white, middle-class, able-bodied, cisgender man (which I am, as are, to my knowledge, all the other male publicists that I’ve met — this is something that should certainly change ASAP), you don’t spend much time thinking about the intersections upon which your identity lays. So it's surprising when you’re suddenly at a conference that has a talk on navigating the workplace as a woman. I didn't begrudge it at all (it was very engaging!) but it was the first time I've ever been at an event that has presumed its audience would be women without marketing itself towards them explicitly. I'm almost certain that every woman in that audience has had the opposite experience on multiple occasions.

That’s not to say being a man in a woman-dominated industry puts me at any kind of advantage or disadvantage among my peers, but it does make me conscious of my position in relation to everyone else in a way that I’m rarely made aware of usually. And whilst being gay in an industry that is largely straight has made me feel a little alienated in the past, I wouldn’t suggest for a moment that being the only man in the room is akin to being a minority — of course it isn’t. What I do think the experience does, though, is act as an exercise for empathy. If being the only person ‘like you’ in one way or another in a throng of people makes you feel a little strange in spite of all you advantages, then imagine what it’s like having that experience as a part of a systemically disadvantaged group. I do often wonder if I'm treated differently, that I'm being oblivious to a male or female bias in the people I work with, but aside from the times where I've been mistaken for a friend of the author rather than a publicist, I don't really notice it. At most my experience is that of being a novelty, something different — not ideal, maybe, but far more benign than the experience of women working in male-dominated industries.

And at the end of the day, we’ll always have Cher:

On contracts and negotiations in publishing and in life in Brexit Britain

Contracts executive and literary translator Marta Dziurosz provides the most recent installment in our monthly series of insights into the publishing industry.

You hear: “a job in publishing”; the first things you think of are probably editorial, marketing, publicity. Maybe design, possibly finance. But how about operations? Production? And how about contracts? Bigger publishing houses frequently have a dedicated department which deals with drafting and negotiating contracts regarding the purchase of publishing rights from their owners: authors, illustrators, translators, foreign publishers. I work in the contracts department of Pan Macmillan, one of the largest publishers in the UK. My job combines negotiations, drafting contracts, and something that seems quite similar to my other profession, literary translation: being an intermediary between a text (in this case, the contract) and people who don’t understand it (in this case, a lot of people, both in the company and outside it).

To put it simply, the process is as follows: the editor commissioning the book sends the contracts department the basic terms of the deal they've agreed with the rights holder (frequently through an agent); we fit those terms into an appropriate contract template (one of very many), adjusting as necessary, to make sure it suits the specifics of the deal, the book and the author as well as possible, and send this draft to the rights holder; then both sides negotiate the details of the contract, and once everyone's happy, both parties sign the contract and we process the paperwork. This basic pattern gets complicated if a US publisher is involved, or if we're dealing with a book in translation – then the contracts with the original rights holder and the translator have to dovetail.

It's a job that requires an in-depth understanding of the ins and outs of the business, oodles of patience, masses of tact, and a willingness to do a lot of digging in archival files and contracts so old that they might mention “wax cylinders” or “magnetic tape” among their audio formats. Drafting a contract successfully requires familiarity with precedents of other, similar deals, and an awareness of how much those precedents can be tweaked. You might need to consult the legal department to see whether a particularly atypical request from the rights holder can be accommodated, or whether a certain provision will work across country borders. The detail you need to focus on is sometimes truly Byzantine, but at the same time you must be able to then discuss it with people who might not be as fluent in legalese – say, a self-employed Korean children's illustrator, or, indeed, a literary translator – and make sure they understand what you're saying during the negotiations.

This is definitely a behind-the-scenes job; yes, the contracts people do go to launches and raise flutes of prosecco to celebrate authors, but we are not the ones bringing in the big names, the big sales, or the spectacular rights income, not the ones designing the witty, eye-catching and beautiful covers. Still, the contracts stage of a publishing deal is, of course, vital.

Stephen Sparks is truly a bookselling legend. Over his ten years as a bookseller and bookbuyer at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, he became a kind of oracle on indie presses and great literature from all around the world, and so we were really excited when we heard he and his wife Molly Parent were starting out on their own, and taking over Point Reyes Books, in Marin County just north of San Francisco. We checked in with him recently to hear how it’s been going:

And Other Stories: What do you think is special about Point Reyes Books?

Stephen Sparks: Point Reyes Books is a rural bookstore on the edge of a National Seashore. We’re just an hour north of San Francisco, an hour west of Berkeley and Oakland, so our customer base, which is remarkably supportive and loyal, come from all over the Bay Area and beyond. We’re truly a regional bookstore.

AOS: How / why did you get into bookselling?

SS: I grew up in a town with no bookstores, but loved to read, so the first time I stepped into what felt like a real bookstore--one of the big chain stores that are no longer in business--it felt like a dream. Maybe that’s how I decided while in college to apply for a job in a bookstore. Since then, I’ve changed one coast for another, took a detour into publishing, and now with my wife own a bookstore.

AOS: You used to be a bookseller at Green Apple Books – how is running Point Reyes different to managing the GAB stores?

SS: I joke now that while at Green Apple I thought I was busy. Now, I know what being busy really entails. Besides the size of the store and staff, which at Point Reyes are significantly smaller than at Green Apple, I find that bookselling in a small town bookstore is, as one might expect, much more conversational and intimate.

AOS: If money was no object, what changes would you make to your bookshop?

SS: Oh, the temptation. To keep it simple: I would love to have a little more space in which to put a few comfortable chairs and a sofa.

AOS: What’s the funniest thing you ever heard anyone say in the shop?

SS: “This bookstore is better than most of the sex I’ve had.”

To which I say, I’m so sorry. And thank you.

AOS: What’s your favourite And Other Stories book?

SS: Can I pick two? [Ed: but of course!]

Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World and Susana Moreira Marques’s Now and at the Hour of Our Death, which I first heard of at a reading in Lisbon with Susana and Leslie Jamison.

The former book has become a bestselling title at the store and the latter quietly finds the right readers.

Stock of Yuri Herrera’s Signs Preceding the End of the World in GAB when Stephen Sparks was still a manager there...

AOS: What book published in the last year do our readers need to get their hands on?

SS: This will make it just under the wire: Joy Williams’ Ninety-Nine Stories of God.

AOS: What would be your desert island book?

Arifa Akbar on Creating a Literary Magazine from Scratch

In the third of our monthly(-ish) insights into the publishing world, journalist and editor Arifa Akbar tells us about the process of setting up a new online literary magazine

The first day of my job as the Head of Content at Unbound was much like any other other 'first day' experience: I spent it figuring out where the toilets were, creating new passwords and having a fight with the photocopier.

The following morning, I had a meeting with Unbound’s co-founder, Dan Kieran, and its Head of Product, Hannah Whelan. An hour later, I was pronounced the launch editor of Boundless, a high-quality online magazine for long-form writing that Unbound would launch, invest in, and nurture, but which would remain editorially independent from Unbound the publisher.

The vision was of a literary site that would celebrate books, ideas and good writing. Dan used the Greek word ‘autotelic’, which (I have since learned) is a thing undertaken for its own sake. In other words, this wasn’t about marketing, or advertising revenue, or money-making. It was about the pleasure and purpose of words and books.

Unbound had been thinking about it for months and had now decided that it was urgent in a world in which traditional books coverage was attenuating or producing predictable material, written for the same old people by the same old people, and always attached to whichever book a publisher was trying to punt.

I knew the limits of traditional literary journalism only too well - the newspaper on which I had worked for fifteen years had folded in physical form a year ago and so had almost all of its books coverage with it. I found myself increasingly turning to American online sites for the most interesting writing on books.

So what Unbound proposed was thrilling to me. I came out of the meeting fizzing with excitement. I would be free to commission whatever I wanted, as long as it was truly thought-provoking. I wasn’t tasked to consider ‘clicks’ or be a slave to internet analytics. The more quirky and counter-intuitive the better, they said.

It was the dream job for a books editor, but all the same, I hit the ground running. We were due to launch around October and we had yet to design the platform or commission its content. We had to act quickly.

Dan dreamt up the name - ‘Boundless: Liberating Ideas.’ Hannah helped to recruit a designer who would focus on building the site and erected a visual board filled with the design suggestions; Dan had already secured investment and ring-fenced a budget that exceeded the one I had to work with on The Independent. John Mitchinson, Unbound’s co-founder, had built up the hugely revered Backlisted podcast, which would be part of Boundless. The rest was up to me.

I set to work. I didn’t just want to rely on the usual publishers’ catalogues for my inspiration and so I sat and thought for a while. I had just reviewed a debut novel about a fist fighter by Fiona Mozley, a 29-year-old gay woman. Her book, Elmet wound up on the Man Booker longlist. I contacted her and she agreed to write a long read for us on fatal masculinity and the figure of the Goliath in literature.

More material came fast and furiously: a Q&A with Jonathan Coe (he is publishing an illustrated fable with Unbound); pieces by Jenny Erpenbeck, Andrew Solomon, Preti Taneja, on the books that have most marked each of them for a weekly slot called ‘Book of a Lifetime’, which used to feature in The Indy.

Alex Clark is interviewing Siri Hustvedt; I am producing a podcast from a live conversation with Roddy Doyle at the Henley Literature Festival; Meike Ziervogel is writing of her experience at the Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon where she is teaching creative writing – in Arabic; Jo Glanville is writing about an archive of letters by Josef Mengele; Damian Barr is mediating on the pleasure and pain of finishing a book. Ali Smith will write an essay. So will David Olusoga (pictured below). The best and edgiest known voices will come together with the best unknown ones.

This is a beginning. There is still much to do. All commissions must come in and then be carefully edited. Images must be found. A social media team at Unbound must push the material out. The site must evolve as we go, both in design and content. There are bigger, wackier ideas, but we are taking small steps, as we must, to lay down firm foundations.

It’s a serious endeavour which requires serious thought and work. It helps to be part of a company that truly values creativity, and which had an idea to create literary content in a world with diminishing column inches on books and ideas, purely for the sake of it.

Following on from our guest post from Claire Browne of Serpent’s Tail on being LGBT+ in publishing, we’re highlighting a few of our favourite recent and forthcoming books written by LGBT+ writers or about LGBT+ themes - some published by us, some from other indie publishers, all necessary. 

Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones, tr. Clarissa Botsford (And Other Stories)

When Hana’s dying uncle calls her back from the city to the family home in the Albanian mountains, he tries to marry her to a local man who could run the household. Unable to accept the arranged marriage and determined to remain independent, Hana’s only option is to follow tradition and vow to live the rest of her life in chastity as a man – and so Hana becomes Mark. For a sworn virgin, there is no way back.

Years later, Mark – now a raki-drinking, chain-smoking shepherd – receives an invitation to join a cousin in the US. This may be Mark’s only chance to escape his vow. But what does he know about being an American woman?

Your Silence Will Not Protect You by Audre Lorde (Silver Press - out Oct 2017)

An intense and furious collection of essays and poems by this brilliantly articulate 20th century feminist writer and activist, who used her words and her actions to make visible a black, lesbian feminist identity. As well as the activism, there’s real beauty and clarity here, for instance in the essay ‘Uses of the Erotic’, where she talks about the power of bringing the erotic into everything we do:

‘In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.’

This are true, angry and, most of all, inspiring words we can all take something from in troubling times.

Black Wave by Michelle Tea (And Other Stories)

Grungy and queer, Michelle is a grrrl hung up on a city in riot. It’s San Francisco and it’s 1999. Determined to quell her addictions to heroin, catastrophic romance, and the city itself, she heads south for LA, just as the news hits: in one year the world is Officially Over. The suicides have begun. And it’s here that Black Wave breaks itself open, splitting into every possible story, questioning who has the right to write about whom. People begin to dream the lovers they will never have, while Michelle takes haven in a bookshop, where she contemplates writing about her past (sort of), dating Matt Dillon (kind of), and riding out the end of the world (maybe).

New from Michelle Tea, novelist, essayist, and queer counter-culture icon, Black Wave is a punk feminist masterpiece and a raucously funny read for everyone … except, perhaps, for Scientologists.

Chelsea Girls - Eileen Myles (Serpent’s Tail)

In this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms her life into a work of art. Suffused with alcohol, drugs, and sex; evocative in its depictions of the hardscrabble realities of a young queer artist's life; with raw, flickering stories of awkward love, laughter, and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool, and intimate account of how one young female writer managed to shrug off the imposition of a rigid cultural identity.Told in her audacious and singular voice made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, Chelsea Girls weaves together memories of Myles's 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, her volatile adolescence, her unabashed "lesbianity," and her riotous pursuit of survival as a poet in 1970s and 80s New York.

The Proof - César Aira tr. Nick Caistor (And Other Stories)

Marcia is sixteen, overweight and unhappy. One day, as she’s walking down a Buenos Aires street, she hears a shout: ‘Wannafuck?’ Startled, she turns around and is confronted by two punk girls Lenin and Mao. She’s soon beguiled by them and the possibilities they open up. But the two have little time for a philosophical discussion of love: they need proof of it, and with their own savage logic the duo, calling themselves the Love Commando, hold up a supermarket as the novel climaxes in an unforgettable splatter-fest finale.

Sergio Y. by Alexandre Vidal Porto tr. Alex Ladd (Europa Editions)

Armando is one of the most renowned therapists in São Paulo. One of his patients, a 17-year-old boy by the name of Sergio, abruptly interrupts his course of therapy after a trip to New York. Sergio’s cursory explanation to Armando is that he has finally found his own path to happiness and must pursue it.

For years, without any further news of Sergio, Armando wonders what happened to his patient. He subsequently learns that Sergio is living a happy life in New York and that he is now a woman, Sandra. Not long after this startling discovery, however, Armando is shocked to read about Sandra’s unexpected death. In an attempt to discover the truth about Sergio and Sandra’s life, Armando starts investigating on his own.

Sergio Y. is a unique and moving story about gender, identity, and the search for happiness.

Open Door by Iosi Havilio tr. Beth Fowler (And Other Stories)

When her partner disappears, a young veterinary assistant drifts from the city towards Open Door, a small town in the Pampas named after its psychiatric hospital. Embarking on a new life in the country, she finds herself living with an ageing ranch-hand and courted by an official investigating her partner’s disappearance. She might settle down, although a local girl is also irresistible . . .

This evocative, atmospheric book makes a quiet case for the possibility of finding contentment in unexpected places – and tells it in unexpected ways.

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (Melville House)

A timely and genre-bending memoir that offers fresh and fierce reflections on motherhood, desire, identity and feminism.

At the centre of The Argonauts is the love story between Maggie Nelson and the artist Harry Dodge, who is fluidly gendered. As Nelson undergoes the transformations of pregnancy, she explores the challenges and complexities of mothering and queer family making.

Writing in the tradition of public intellectuals like Susan Sontag, Nelson uses arresting prose even as she questions the limits of language. The Argonauts is an intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of love, language, and family.

The Alphabet of Birds by SJ Naudé tr. by the author (And Other Stories)

If death comes to a loved one, can we grieve alone? When all around is in ruins, can we confine our lives to one beautiful room constructed out of art, or love, or family ties? And when the words we know prove inadequate, can we turn to the language of birds?

In an arty mansion in Milan’s industrial zone, two men are shown one of the last remaining Futurist noise machines – an Intonarumore – and a painful old truth surfaces. A musician travels to three continents to see her siblings before returning to Johannesburg; her home is plundered every night around her as she composes a requiem. A man follows his male lover from London to Berlin’s clubbing scene and on to a ruined castle in which the lover’s family lives. He is looking for an antidote.

The protagonists in SJ Naudé’s collection are listening out for answers that cannot be expressed. Offering fresh perspectives on gay, expat and artistic subcultures and tackling the pain of loss head on, Naudé’s stories go fearlessly and tenderly to the heart of our experiences of desire, love and death.

London Triptych by Jonathan Kemp (Myriad Editions)

Jack Rose begins his apprenticeship as a rent boy with Alfred Taylor in the 1890s, and finds a life of pleasure and excess leads him to new friendships — most notably with the soon-to-be infamous Oscar Wilde. A century later, David tells his own tale of unashamed decadence while waiting to be released from prison, addressing his story to the lover who betrayed him. Where their paths cross, in the politically sensitive 1950s, the artist Colin Read tentatively explores his sexuality as he draws in preparation for his most ambitious painting yet — ‘London Triptych’.

Editorial Assistant at Serpent’s Tail/Profile Claire Browne on her experiences of working in publishing as a gay woman.

“The loneliest place in this world is the no-man’s-land of sex”

                                                                                                          Radclyffe Hall

Books and literature have always been my way of connecting with my Dad. To me, my Dad read everything and knew everything. He knew the Latin root of every word I ever asked him. He had a book with an answer for every question I ever had.

He taught me that books were powerful.

I grew up a catholic in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Homosexuality wasn’t mentioned, positively or negatively, because it just didn’t exist. I was fascinated by the concept, particularly of gay women, but I didn’t know of any, let alone any that looked like me, so I convinced myself that I simply wasn’t one, and left it at that. Better to be safe and unremarkable than gay.

I bought my first gay book when I was fourteen. I had stumbled across the film My Summer of Love starring Emily Blunt. It was terrifying and liberating to see lesbian women that didn’t fit the stereotype that I had known. I googled the film immediately and discovered that it was a book written by Helen Cross. I ordered it from Amazon and watched the door every day after school to make sure my parents didn’t get to it before I did.

It was from this first transgression that I was introduced and shackled to the world of LGBT+ fiction. I devoured it. I read anything that had even a passing mention of a queer character. Although it was difficult to feed such an addiction when the libraries had an extremely limited collection of LGBT+ novels, and my parents did not approve. Reading became secretive, obsessive, and essential, and it changed my relationship with books forever.

The stories I dug out I found hugely titillating, but as I grew older they only deepened the chasm between my fantasies and my reality, since the characters and situations were so clearly fiction, and were so eroticised that I could never fully connect. I felt like I was betraying the ‘purity’ of reading and it made me guilty, restless, and dissatisfied – which was a large part of the reason I got into publishing. I understood the power of books, and how essential they are to underrepresented groups in society. I could never find a book that I connected with on all fronts, and I was determined to do so, even if it meant I had to publish it myself.

The difficulty for publishers of gay and lesbian literature from a business perspective, is that they tend to find the book cast into a grey area between mainstream and niche publishing. Whilst several books in recent years have managed to bridge this gap: The Price of Salt / Carol by Patricia Highsmith; A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood; Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, this crossover (particularly with lesbian narratives) is due to their conflation with other genres – namely mystery and crime. As a gay woman in the industry today it feels like there is very little literary, lesbian fiction available, and that lesbian, trans and narratives of people of colour are often side-lined or published as salacious tragedy-porn.

In previous years we haven’t had the luxury of being able to ask for / demand accurate representation. We were given what fit the narrative, and the platforms LGBT+ publishing has traditionally been given are those that tie it to trauma – to dirty sex, to AIDS, to brutality and to shame – or to eroticism, where they can be consumed and made uncomplicated. It’s incredibly frustrating to see LGBT+ characters reduced to a queer footnote, used as a plot device, or used as ‘queer-bait’ before being swiftly despatched. There is rarely a happy ending for LGBT+ characters in fiction. Just as it is incredibly important that younger readers see themselves represented in literature, it is equally as important for adults, and disheartening when nothing is available.

In my experience, it looks as though many publishers are reluctant to publish more than a handful of LGBT+ books a year. Whilst there has been an undeniable uplift in the number of narratives being published, and an unmistakeable crossover between books written for and about the LGBT+ community / experience, it’s important for publishers to see the readership as a composite of identities, rather than one opaque umbrella. LGBT+ readers will read outside of their own orientation because there are common experiences we share, but singular representation and visibility is incredibly important.

I’m very fortunate to work for an incredible independent publisher [Profile/Serpent’s Tail] with a fantastically diverse backlist (and frontlist) of LGBT+ literature – I go into our archives and stumble upon more books than I’d ever expected to see, from writers across the spectrum. Strangely, it does seem like independent publishers are doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to quality LGBT+ and minority representation, despite the risks being greater.

It’s something that needs to change, so long as publishers see themselves as not only a business, but as curators of cultural content and a vehicle for pushing art. We have a history and a future as rich and full of love and hope and personhood as any other, and we deserve to have the full breadth of it acknowledged and published

Claire’s books that made her:

Stone Butch Blues – by Leslie Feinberg (it’s available for free online and it’s essential)

The First Bad Man – by Miranda July

Before Night Falls – by Reinaldo Arenas

Chelsea Girls – by Eileen Myles

Our publisher Stefan Tobler was recently at Book Expo America (to give you a sense of the madness, here’s Lithub’s piece on the legendary parties, including ours). ANYWAY... in between the half-price tiki bar cocktails and the schmoozing, Stefan caught up with some of our favourite US booksellers, including Jeremy Garber from Powell’s Books in Portland, which, dear readers, is the world’s largest independent bookstore! (Yuri Herrera is stopping in there for the last event of his 2017 US tour on 3 July.)

What do you think is special about Powell’s?

There are so many special things about Powell’s, as anyone who has spent a day lost among the stacks there can attest to well. Founded in 1971, Powell’s remains a family-owned company, now in its third generation. We are one of the largest man-made tourist attractions in the state of Oregon and visitors often remark that a trip to Portland is incomplete without a stop at our flagship City of Books location (an entire city block: 68,000 sq. ft., four stories, nine color-coded rooms, and over one million books on the shelves). As a company, we host over 500 author events a year, regularly welcoming a wealth of talent to our stores. As Miriam Sontz, our CEO, says often, our charge as booksellers is to “connect a reader to an author’s voice,” which we do “one book at a time, a thousand times a day.”

How/why did you get into bookselling?

I moved from the East Coast (Philadelphia) to Portland in the summer of 2005. Shortly after arriving, I was hired at Powell’s as a temporary, part-time holiday cashier. Since then, I’ve made my way throughout different areas of the company, from working within the literature section (Blue Room), to five years as a used book buyer, to my current role as the events coordinator and a member of the marketing team. Despite being a lifelong and insatiable reader, I never had considered a career in bookselling prior to moving to Portland, but after so many years at Powell’s, it’s hard to imagine a more fulfilling place to be.

What is your favourite And Other Stories book?

There are far too many to settle on just one, but I am especially fond of Paulo Scott’s Nowhere People, all three of Yuri Herrera’s books, Lunatics, Lovers and Poets: Twelve Stories after Cervantes and Shakespeare – as well as César Aira and Enrique Vila-Matas (published stateside by New Directions).  I’m very much looking forward to reading Ávila Laurel’s The Gurugu Pledge and Pugliese’s Malacqua.

You’re a big fan of Latin-American writing – where does that come from?

As far as fiction goes, my tastes tend predominately towards literature in translation from Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries. I speak neither language, nor have any (known) heritage from such regions, yet… there is something so rich, so magnificent, so playful about their storytelling traditions. Whether reading the classics or any of the ever-growing and impressive crop of young writers from these countries, I’m always struck by how full of life these works are.

With so many talented translators working to bring novels and stories into English, I now will take a chance on a book based solely on who the translator is. If I see a book was rendered from the Spanish or Portuguese by the likes of Margaret Jull Costa, Natasha Wimmer, Katherine Silver, Chris Andrews, Megan McDowell, Lisa Dillman, Valerie Miles, Christina MacSweeney, Nick Caistor, Rhett McNeil, Sophie Hughes, Will Vanderhyden, or Alison Entrekin (among others) – I’ll pick up that book in an instant, without needing to know even a single thing more about the author or book itself.

What book published in the last year do our readers need to get their hands on?

A few of my favorites from the past year or two include Rafael Chirbes’s On the Edge (New Directions), Voyage to India (Dalkey Archive) by Gonçalo M. Tavares, and the Best Translated Book Award-winning Chronicle of the Murdered House (Open Letter) by Lúcio Cardoso. These three books could not be more dissimilar, but they are each an outstanding accomplishment and an exemplar of literary beauty at is finest.

What would be your desert island book?

Kadija George on the history of Black publishers in the UK

photo: Victor DIamini

‘The bravery and endurance of these Black and Asian publishers must be understood if we are to present a true image of British publishing and its impact on our society. It is also vital, if we are to encourage more BAME publishing professionals and writers, that British publishing is inclusive and welcomes all comers.’

‘Let’s Not Forget’ by Jazzmine Breary in Writing The Future report, published by Spread The Word 2015.

The history of Black publishers in Britain, much like other areas of Black history is at best invisible, or worse, misrepresented and misunderstood. The irony is that, although Black publishers tell the stories of Blacks in Britain, their own stories have until recently remained untold, even within the growing body of work on Black history.  For example, in one of the most highly regarded texts of Black history in Britain, Staying Power by Peter Fryer, the mention of pioneering Black publishers amounts to one paragraph

However, 2015 was a turning point as two exhibitions in London featured the work and legacy of New Beacon Books (founded by Trinidadian John La Rose in 1966) and Bogle L’Ouverture Press, (founded by Eric and Jessica Huntley in 1967). ‘No Colour Bar’ at the Guildhall Gallery and ‘A Dream to Change the World’ at the Islington Museum (yes, John La Rose believed that the world could be positively changed through the publishing of works that spoke to justice and equality) were mounted with significant support from the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Their work is now increasingly recognised as having a major impact on Black history in Britain from the 1960s as they created space in print and protest to accurately reflect Black life in Britain from a Black informed bias rather than from a white speculative one.  The work they published was primarily poetry, non-fiction and literary criticism in books, pamphlets, and journals. It is true however, that novels by Black writers were being published at this time by UK based publishers. In 1962 OUP had started Three Crowns and Heinemann had started the African Writers Series, but the latter was started as and remains an educational imprint, not intended for the UK market.

Although Allison and Busby was not a Black publishing house per se,  the books they published, particularly in their early years (from 1966), mean that Margaret Busby is known as a stalwart publisher of those times. They published groundbreaking writers such as Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta, whose trilogy Ada’s Story told the story of a single mother of five struggling to survive and write in London. Emecheta is still heralded as a heroine, continuing to inspire women of all ages and ethnicities.

Hansib Publications was started by Arif Ali in 1971, initially to publish newspapers and journals, but gravitating to the publishing of books.

The first titles of all these publishers spoke out loudly against anti-capitalism and anti-colonialism, setting the trend for the titles that followed, some of which, such as How Europe Underdeveloped Africa continue to have significant sales today. Throughout the years, particularly until the mid-1980s, these publishers, along with others, worked together on various projects and campaigns.

One of the main challenges today then, for new Black publishers is to be visible within the publishing industry in an environment where impact and economic sustainability matter in a highly technical creative industry, yet the community still have expectations for them to be socially conscious too.

Within the past ten years, new black publishing houses that have emerged have clearly taken this on board. Crystal Mahey-Morgan, for example, promotes her publishing company, Own It! as a ‘lifestyle brand’. Established in 2015, she publishes fiction and non-fiction. Most of her experience in publishing is in marketing and she uses all of the elements at her disposal to enable her to fill a 1000-seater venue for an event focused on the book launch. She combines the traditional approach, announcing the hardback title in advance, alongside manipulating social and digital media to reach her various audiences. Similarly, the name of another press Jacaranda Books Arts Music, shows that they are aware of the importance of selling across products. Founded by Valerie Brandes in 2012, their aim is to ‘Celebrate cultural, ethnic and social diversity in literature.’

Limehouse Books, established in 2009 by Bobby Nayyar have taken a slightly different direction in that they commission books, rather than taking on the time-consuming manuscript submission and acquisition process. They have also partnered with organisations to produce books. Although Cassava Republic Press was established in Nigeria in 2006 by Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, she set up a branch in the UK ten years later to publish African writers in the diaspora. The rationale behind her selection comes from her belief that it’s the right time to ask challenging questions of African writing, ‘where have we come from, where are we now, where are we going?’ Their mission is to ‘change the way we all think about African writing’.

The founders of all of these publishing houses hold degrees in the field of publishing or and have worked in more than one mainstream publishing house as an employee, or paid internship, often through a training scheme for people from ethnically diverse backgrounds. They can also be seen at trade fairs such as the London Book Fair alongside their peers from other publishing houses. These are the main difference between them and their radical, activist predecessors, yet all acknowledge and are aware of the history of black publishing in Britain that has gone before them, the achievements made and the path that was paved for them by these publishers and of their responsibilities to the community, particularly to the community of readers that they want to reach and represent.  

Black publishers, then and now, represent a specialised area of publishing. What could be considered, alongside increasing the diversity of human resources within mainstream publishing houses, is to place young white trainees within Black companies as part of their training, in order to gain knowledge that they would not otherwise access in a larger corporate entity. Leicester University, for example, run a transcultural publishing module for undergraduates in their final year. The module is always oversubscribed. Most of the students are not Black, yet it trains a future workforce to understand that cultural diversity is the norm rather than an exception.

Routes into publishing are gradually becoming more open to those who may previously only have seen closed doors. In the UK we are fortunate enough to have professional writer development programmes, partly funded by Arts Council England. The programmes offer advice and can point people in the direction of opportunities and further information if needed.  Some of these, such as Inscribe and Commonword, have Black staff members with skills, knowledge and experience in various areas of publishing and writing.

For more information on these programmes around the UK, see the following links:

Spread The Word (London) – https://www.spreadtheword.org.uk

Inscribe (Yorkshire) – http://www.peepaltreepress.com/inscribe

Writing East Midlands – http://www.writingeastmidlands.co.uk

Commonword / Cultureword (North West) – http://www.cultureword.org.uk/

New Writing North – http://www.newwritingnorth.com/

New Writing South (South East) – https://www.newwritingsouth.com/

Scottish Book Trust – www.scottishbooktrust.com/

Literature Wales – http://www.literaturewales.org/

Other useful links:

Download Spread the Word’s Writing the Future report

Visit the Hackney Museums exhibition page

Link to 50th anniversary celebrations for the George Padmore Institut

The Radical Lives of Eric & Jessica Huntley – No Colour Bar: http://huntleysonline.com/f-h-a-l-m-a/bbaa-art-exhibition/

By Kadija George

@kadijattug

Doctoral Researcher at Brighton University on Black British Publishers

This month, Bookshop of the Month heads to Texas, to speak to Mark Haber, a brilliant bookseller at the legendary Brazos Bookstore in Houston. Like us, he’s a huge fan of Latin America literature, and we wanted to find out more... (that’s him on the left by the way - the other guy is Keaton. Say hi from us!)  

And Other Stories: What do you think is special about Brazos? Mark Haber: Brazos is a very special bookstore. It has been a part of the literary community of Houston since 1974. In fact, Donald Barthleme, who was one of the founders of the University of Houston writing program, was an instrumental part of the store in its early years, along with the founder of the store Karl Kilian. There are a few independent bookstores in Houston, but I'm proud of our pedigree. We joking call ourselves the 'smarty-pants' bookstore, but there's no pretension. We love great books and want our customers to find the books they love.

AOS: How/why did you get into bookselling? MH: I taught middle school and high school English for several years but wasn't very happy. I was a customer of Brazos and my persistence to work at the store eventually paid off! I've always loved books and actually had a short story collection published in 2009 (Deathbed Conversions) that is coming out in Spanish translation from a Mexican press this April. So I've always wanted to be a part of the book world.

AOS: What's the funniest thing you ever heard anyone say in the shop? MH: That's a tough question! Often it's the customer's descriptions of what they're looking for and how far from the actual  title it is. Or the people who don't remember the author or the title but remember that it had a 'blue cover'. Things like that are always amusing.

AOS: What is your favourite And Other Stories book? MH: Another tough question! I really enjoyed Requiem For A Soldier by Oleg Pavlov. The Yuri Herrera books, obviously. I also enjoyed By Night the Mountain Burns. To me, these are amazing, visceral novels of the highest level. And Other Stories has such a high level of quality. You publish many of the writers that New Directions publishes here in the states - Vila-Matas and Aira, for example - so I just love your aesthetic in general.

AOS: You're a big fan of Latin-American writing - does that come from being Texas-based do you think? MH: I honestly believe I could live anywhere and I'd be a enormous fan of Latin American writing. I'm actually a Texas implant. I grew up in Florida and spent four years living in Los Angeles in my early 20's. These are all places with huge Latin American communities, with huge influence, of course. And I went to high school with many people from the Dominican Republic and Mexico. I simply think Spanish-language writers, even though they obviously vary - are amazing storytellers. There's a tradition of mixing great storytelling with a humanity, a generousness of spirit. I read Garcia Marquez and fell in love. Years later I discovered Bolaño and there was no looking back. I also don't think another language could've produced a writer like Borges. I know that doesn't make practical sense but it's the way I see it.

AOS: What book published in the last year do our readers need to get their hands on? MH: I think Crossing the Sea: With Syrians on the Exodus to Europe is probably the most pressing and vital book. It's non-fiction, obviously, but very important journalism that speaks to the state of the world.

As bookshop chains go, you can’t get much more stylish than Daunt Books. We love the amazing Edwardian oak galleries of their Marylebone store. We’re also totally besotted with the local touches and expert hand-selling at the smaller stores, so this month we’ve been catching up with booksellers Olivia Griffiths and James Elliott at their Belsize Park branch.

And Other Stories: What do you think is special about Daunt Books in general and the Belsize Park store in particular?

James Elliott: Any reader wanting a recommendation for their next book can come into Daunt Books and expect a full-on personal bookseller service - from the ground up, the way the shops are run is to allow booksellers to devote as much time as possible to ask questions, do research and basically do anything to get that reader a book that is absolutely right for them. And yet, we try to display things in such a way that anyone wanting to come and browse alone, in peace and at their own pace, can hopefully find something perfect they otherwise might not have done. (I think most bookshops aim to offer the same services, but I think we strike the balance more often than not.)

Olivia Griffiths: I would have to agree with James on the considered curation of the shops in what we stock and pass onto our customers to read. I think the contribution that they make to the local community - Belsize Park very much included! - cannot be underestimated either and in a city famed for its commitment to the avoidance of eye contact on public transport, the moments of connection that take place here are increasingly valuable for bookseller and customer alike.

AOS: If money was no object, what changes would you make to your bookshop?

OG: Infinite amounts of storage and self-dusting shelves!

JE: An in-store print-on-demand book machine, like the Espresso but fancier (and a completely reformatted rights market to allow new books to be printed there and then and not just delivered from warehouses).

 AOS: How / why did you get into bookselling?

JE: The money. [Readers - we think this may be ironic. Ed.]

OG: It seemed like the easiest way to keep reading, thinking and talking about books as I’ve always loved to do . The fact that it pays the bills is, of course, a bonus.

AOS: What’s the funniest thing you ever heard anyone say in the shop?

OG: The novelty of not needing to pay for our plastic bags [small businesses are exempt from the 5p charge] continues apace. The latest enthusiastic recipient recently informed me that they are ‘fantastic for marinating’.

JE: A Brexiteer and former frontman of a 90s pop group told me he was voting to leave the EU because if you’ve got a problem with the government here, you can pack your car full of explosives and drive to Parliament quite easily, but if you’ve got a problem with the EU, you’ve got to drive those explosives all the way to Brussels, which is totally unrealistic.

AOS: What’s your favourite And Other Stories book?

JE: Martin John [by Anakana Schofield]. An almost impossibly brilliant and powerful example of style augmenting content, and content augmenting style (AND that content being seriously important to boot).

OG: Vertigo by Joanna Walsh, a ‘novel’ that played a big part in revealing to me the extent of the possibilities of experimental forms in fiction. It set me on the path of finding many other similarly instructive female authors that continue to redefine our understanding of the limits of genre and expression.

AOS: What book published in the last year do our readers need to get their hands on?

JE: Horrible question, great question - The Argonauts [by Maggie Nelson], or A Cup of Rage [by Raduan Nassar - translated by our very own Stefan Tobler], or The Lesser Bohemians [by Eimear McBride].

OG: For balance: Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles by way of fiction, The Hatred of Poetry by Ben Lerner from Fitzcarraldo’s enviable non-fiction list and, lastly, Edmund Gordon’s soon-to-be classic biography The Invention of Angela Carter.

AOS: What would be your desert island book?

OG: I don’t think I’m alone in having that one book that I earnestly pick up & intend to read once every few months but have yet to finish. For me, it’s Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook that I would hope to, distraction aside, finally conquer.

Our Stefan Tobler’s recent reading tip:

Alice Oswald’s seventh collection Falling Awake (2016, Jonathan Cape) is the leisure time reading that most astounded me recently. I’ve long loved her writing and the poems in this book are among her very best. If you haven’t yet, pick it up in a bookshop and you’ll see. (It was sitting on the well-stocked poetry shelves of The Book Case, Hebden Bridge, waiting for me.) Try ‘Fox’, about a mother fox, ‘a woman with a man’s voice’, who ‘barked at my house [...] in the heart’s thick accent’:

as if to say: it’s midnight

and my life

is laid beneath my children

like gold leaf

Dan Chiasson in the New Yorker takes it to be a poem about the ‘fear every parent has felt: that they will wake to find that their children have died in their beds’, but personally I heard a mother fox waking a human mother into a new understanding of motherhood and of herself.

And listen to the head of Orpheus, in ‘Severed Head Floating Downriver’, becoming part of the river but who wishes: ‘if only a child on a bridge would hoik me out’.

And in her 40-page ‘Tithonus’ hear and watch dawn arrive, minute by minute one midsummer, as it is experienced by an ancient man. The eponymous Tithonus of Greek mythology is a man condemned never to die. Eos, the dawn, who is in love with Tithonus, had asked Zeus to make him immortal, and so he lies there: ‘a man rolls over and pulls / his grief to his chin and his feet have / no covers’. He is a lonely man, always looking on as the dawn approaches yet again in all her (in this poem: very English) manifestations (a ‘lark in a prayer-draught’, ‘crows with their rusty voice-handles’), and he wishes for death. I hope these glimpses will suggest to you how her poetry is too human for her to be labelled a ‘nature poet’.

Like Basil Bunting, for example, Alice Oswald’s poetry listens intently to lives lived in a particular locality, in her case rural Devon, to say things in a way that are a complete surprise to the reader, but instantly recognisable as the right words. In Basil Bunting’s poem ‘Briggflatts’ the mason says: ‘Pens are too light. / Take a chisel to write.’ While that mason wrote in stone, Oswald once likened her composition to the dry-stone method of making a wall, ‘finding discrete blocks of words and jamming them together to make something unshakable’ (Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Spring 1996). More recently, as Claire Armitstead reported in The Guardian, at Oswald’s ‘book launch [for Falling Awake] she explained that she had begun to envisage her work not as poems so much as “sound carvings”. “I like the idea that sound carving suggests there’s something there already.”’ What is striking is that the finished poetry is not like a stone carving or a stone wall, but quick-flighted, changeable, of the moment, apparently from inside the experience of waters, animals, flowers and people.

As we’re plotting our move to Sheffield, we were excited to see that an independent book and magazine shop has just sprung up right in the centre of the city. There’s nothing run-of-the-mill about it: it’s tightly curated, beautifully designed (their refit is up for the Sheffield Design Awards this month) and a collaborative venture. So on your behalf we’ve quizzed its owners Alex Maxwell of La Biblioteka (in charge of magazines) and Evelyn Risner of Handpicked Books (in charge of, well, the handpicked books).

70 Pinstone Street is a brand-new independent bookshop in Sheffield. It has a strong and well chosen selection of independent books and magazines. It feels pretty unique. Are there any other shops like it in Britain? In the English-speaking world?

Since the renaissance of independent magazines a few years back, more shops are doing interesting lines of magazines to complement their book selection. Having one of us dedicated to each part I think reflects the breadth of the titles in 70 Pinstone. The 'feel' was very important when designing our space - we took our cues more from Japan and Central Europe, where the retail experience is on another level.

There aren't any general independent bookshops in Sheffield, are there? Did there used to be? 

There were a couple in the city centre before the recession, but, perhaps tellingly, they are now Starbucks and Subway outlets. Rhyme and Reason on Hunters Bar (SW of the city centre) has a good selection of children's books, and there are a smattering of second-hand shops - though perhaps not as many as a city this size deserves.

La Biblioteka and Handpicked Books have set up 70 Pinstone Street together. How did that come about? How does it work in practice?

We both applied for a Council grant scheme to encourage independent retailers to set up shop in the City Centre. Advised to apply together, we were successful, and got really lucky finding a space that we could make work on bookseller's margins! The collaborative nature means a lot of the liabilities are shared, but, alas, the admin is often doubled.

Can people order any book they want from you? (Do you charge postage?)

If we stock it, or can source it, then yes, we take orders for books and magazines in person, over the phone or online. (www.labiblioteka.co) If you can't collect from the shop, we'll post at cost.

Is there a typical 70 Pinstone Street customer or book buyer?

As we just opened in May, usually someone who has never noticed us! Honestly though it's very hard to pigeon-hole - a lot of creative folk come in for the design magazines, but there is a strong demand for new and diverse literature.

How / why did you get into bookselling?

Evelyn: I realised the scarcity of non-mainstream new book outlets in Sheffield and in 2012 set up Handpicked Books. I traded at markets and had concessions in other shops from 2012 - 2016.

Name a book published in the last year that you’d like our readers to look at.