OUR BOOKS IN THE PRESS

 

1. A Fish Trapped inside the Wind

Christien Gholson's novel A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind has been reviewed in Booklist. Here is the review:

Like the most finely cadenced, beautifully fanciful works of surrealism, this novel beckons with its subtle nuances before it leaps into a dazzling mastery that will ensnare even the casual reader. The town of Villon, Belgium, is experiencing an extremely odd phenomenon. Dead fish are strewn everywhere. Flung over yards and stoops and fields, the fish puzzle the residents no end as they speculate on the significance of such a bizarre happening. Other intersecting events include a rally meant to protest a decision to use local quarries as toxic dumps and the festival of St. Woelfred, who fled into the wilderness in the seventh century to live out her days reflecting in prayer. A rumored set of lost Rimbaud poems propels the action in ways unimaginable at the start yet utterly convincing by the conclusion. Gholson skillfully interweaves the individual stories of six main characters: a magician, a priest, a Rimbaud scholar, a journalist, a seer, and an aging lothario, who connect and conflict with one another in ways that ring true as each grapples with the choice of “walking through the mirror” of illusion—or not. Building to an extraordinary crescendo of an ending, Gholson’s poetic, purely magical, yet resoundingly human tale deserves a wide audience. — Julie Trevelyan

The book is also reviewed in the forthcoming December issue of New Welsh Review. This issue will also include a short story by Christien and an interview with him.

 

Read more about our author Christien Gholson

Buy A Fish Trapped inside the Wind for £7.99

 

2. Funderland

Funderland has ben reviewed in The Guardian, Independent on Sunday and Buzz Magazine:

'Jarrett has a marvellous ear.'  -- The Guardian

 

'Nigel Jarrett's stories take seemingly ordinary or innocent situations and gently tease out their emotional complexity. Both "Funderland" and "A Point of Dishonour" confound expectations superbly.[...] He's not afraid of unusual perspectives and his bravery is well rewarded in this unusual and sensitive collection.' -- Independent on Sunday

 

'Nigel Jarrett's alert collection of short stories proves an intricate and compelling read.' -- Buzz Magazine

 

Read the reviews in full.

Buy Funderland from us for £7.99

 

3. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Book Runner

Reviewed by Paul Rees (no relation) in the Western Mail on Saturday 12 November:

'[...]Books are Rees’ obsession, not just his living. Every search through an insect-infested crate of battered and mouldy hardbacks and paperbacks starts with a dream of finding the rarest of first editions by a celebrated author, preferably with a dust-jacket.

He goes from auctions to house clearances in th hunt for literary gold, lamenting the increasing book savvy shown by charity shops who call in experts to help them value donations.

The result is an entertaining journey from London and NOrth Wales to Paris, Montpellier and Morocco. [...]'

Read More: http://www.walesonline.co.uk/showbiz-and-lifestyle/books-in-wales/2011/11/12/paul-rees-just-read-91466-29755275/#ixzz1dlhoYlcm

 

4. Ten of the Best = Book of the Month, Buzz Magazine

 

Here is the December 2011 review:

As the latest in Parthian's valuable Bright Young Things series, this fresh and contemporary collection of poetry is a welcome introduction to some of our most promising young Welsh poets. Even for those unfamiliar with a genre sometimes perceived as inaccessible for the average reader, Ten of the Best handles modern life, pathos and biting contemporary comment with wit and style. The five poets included in the collection are Sion Tomos Owen, Anna Lewis, Mab Jones, Alan Kellermann and M.A.Oliver. Each of whom bring their own style of poetry to an overall varied and beguiling read. Sion Tomos Owen's socio-political poems carry weight, while Mab Jones' humour permeates her sometimes darker work. This collection of intriguing Welsh work deserves a place on your bookshelf.'

Gareth Ludkin

 

You can pick Buzz up at outlets across South Wales, or read it for free online.

Buy Ten of the Best from us for £6.99

 

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THE RACONTEUR 'AMERICA'

Edgy stories with a family background - Nigel Jarrett's new Parthian collection

 

FUNDERLAND

 

'Nigel Jarrett's imagination takes readers out of their comfort zone' - Alan Ross, London Magazine

 

 

Nigel Jarrett, whose Parthian short-story collection Funderland is just published, says he's proud to be a Welsh writer but also happy - for the time being - with not writing about Wales.

    The stories in Funderland find their characters in edgy situations and there's a family theme running through them.

    Funderland comes with glowing endorsements for Jarrett's stories from Alan Ross, formerly editor of London Magazine, and the writer and broadcaster Jon Gower.

    "One of the important tasks for me as a writer calling myself  Welsh is proving that I can do what any other writer does, Welsh or otherwise," Jarrett says. "That's not any kind of conscious or abject justification; it's just the obverse of an expatriate Welsh writer, such as Rhys Davies, writing a lot about his homeland.

    "I'm biased in favour of  Davies for one obvious reason: a few years ago, I won the short-story award that bears his name. But something he said in non-fictional mode would have stayed with me even if I'd been one of his detractors. This was his view of the description 'Welsh writer' as meaning only a writer with some Welsh connection - Welsh by birth, for instance, if not fraternity.

    "From his Fitzrovian redoubt in London, the ugly-lovely Clydach Vale must have appeared to the successful Davies as a place washed by nostalgia of its more unprepossessing features. In another 'Welsh writer' these might have been worth highlighting and returning to in non-fictional or any other mode as a means of affirming a Welshness Davies would probably have found uncomfortable. Welsh by birth applies to Martin Amis. But is Amis a Welsh writer in the sense of one claimed proprietorially by a nation as one of its own? I think not."

    Jarrett, a freelance writer and former newspaperman, says because he lives in Monmouthshire and was born and raised there when as a tier of local government it nominally included what is now Torfaen, the regular slippage of his adherence to Wales and Welshness mirrors the historical identity problem of the place itself. The confluence of the rivers Severn and Wye, ten minutes from his doorstep, often seems to be  a metaphor for a drift into the wider world, albeit in a coracle spinning westward and somewhat but excitingly out of control.

    "Davies the ex-pat nearly always wrote about the Wales he'd left," he says. "Even in his early short fiction, there's a sense of that locale being less important than other, more universal, elements. His first published novel, The Withered Root (1927), charts the decline of the evangelist Reuben Daniels, torn between religious faith and attraction for the hot-blooded Eirwen Vaughan.  He rejects her, confirming the view of another character,  Eirwen’s  Lawrentian brother, Philip, that Welsh Non-Conformist towns are hopelessly stagnated. Well, that's Welsh for you.

    "But in The Chosen One, winner of the 1966 American Edgar Award for the best short fiction of the year. Audrey Vines torments young Rufus into murdering her, thereby meeting her fate, the lot of a woman so domineering that she destroys herself. By this time, Davies had flushed meaningful local colour from his work.  Audrey’s russet mansion of Plas Idwal and Brychan Cottage, where Rufus seethes before her ruthless forays, are Welsh in name only.

    "This is not  Clydach Vale but a dark echo-chamber of the will. In one sense, Davies was always moving forwards as an artist, spinning downriver."

    Anyone claiming writers as Welsh in the dubious sense of their being patriotic or particular or otherwise affirming of Gwalian characteristics might be expected to apply rigorous rules of membership, Jarrett says. That the universal is to be found in the Gwalian particular perhaps behoves them to be more understanding of those who, like  him, live in border country and stare in all directions, often with their backs to the hills and vales.

    "The year I won the Rhys Davies Prize, judges wanted competing writers to reflect on some aspect of  contemporary Wales. I chose to explore the home-sickness and romantic turmoil of a Japanese company boss's wife. As the critic David Callard kindly and correctly pointed out, the effect achieved was a kind of inverted hiraeth as the diminutive Mrs Kuroda contemplated suicide not ritually (seppuku being confined to samurai and other alpha-males) but atop a very Welsh summit - Penyfan, in the Brecon Beacons. Being a short story, of course, it may not have been a suicide attempt at all. Typically, 'contemporary' Wales for me involved looking at the country in terms of how others were involved in it."

    Jarrett claims that we are always best defined by the way we inter-act with others. Seeing the updated country as a place where unemployed drug-addicted ex-steelworkers are more typical than hackneyed Welsh stereotypes would have been another way of doing it. But once you start on that controversial tack, he believes, almost any unconsidered aspect of Wales makes not a special plea for consideration, like the effect of Far East multinationals on the Welsh economy (itself admittedly controversial), but an ‘in your face’ antidote from inside.

    " I remember how Jimmy McGovern’s TV drama The Lakes began with teenage couples having it away on the fells, as if to announce that The Lakes had nothing to do with the reveries of Romantic poets in a tranquil land, its universal denominator. Well, of course not, you fools. The implication of such portrayals is that we don’t imagine fell-top fornicating to be something that actually takes place. Speak for yourself, Jimmy."

      Jarrett, who is a music critic, poet and essayist, and reviews poetry for Acumen magazine and jazz for Jazz Journal, says:  "This much is true and deliberately provocative: I was born, raised and educated in Wales and I’ve never lived anywhere else. What I’ve gained from that experience as a writer is not an unconditional love of country but a desire and a confidence to look outwards from a firm anchorage.

" In my world, it matters not that a young girl threatened by a predatory stepfather - one of the stories in Funderland -  is Welsh but that the Welshness of individuals and setting is mere predicate, as useful as any other. When Welshness is morally, fictionally or specifically relevant, we are dealing with a different category. While it’s being explored, I’m in my coracle beyond the border and on the ebbing tide, but probably with Lewis Jones’s Cwmardy in my pocket. Tides, of course, also flow. And I always carry a mobile."  

Funderland will be officially launched at Café Jazz, St Mary Street, Cardiff, on Sunday October 16. Doors open 6pm. Readings, nibbles and music will be on offer. Drinks at the bar, please.

Funderland can be purchased in the Parthian Bookshop by clicking here

A version of this interview first appeared in the Western Mail newspaper on September 17.

 

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Deborah Kay Davies, author of Grace, Tamar and Lazslo the Beautiful and Winner of Wales Book of the Year 2009 and Rebecca Hunt, contributor to Parthian's Nu Magazine for young writers have been chosen by John Mullan of the Guardian as 'Twelve of the Best New Novelists' of the future. He writes of the two: 

 

•Rebecca Hunt's Mr Chartwell (Fig Tree), the original Black Dog, is just delightful in his blithe audacity – and that's how I think of her as a writer – she's got swagger. She took Churchill's term for his clinical depression – "the black dog", hyper-realised it and placed the result right in the centre of a story about grief.

•Deborah Kay Davies's True Things About Me (Canongate) is a brutal story in brutal prose. The unnamed narrator works in a benefit office, a criminal walks in and literally claims her. Desire is portrayed here as a kind of breakdown – everything is wrecked in its pursuit.

 

Parthian are launching the second edition of Nu Magazine - Nu2: Memorable Firsts - in July of this year with a launch at Chapter Arts Centre.

To read the whole article on the Guardian website,

here http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/25/literary-fiction-twelve-best-new-novelists

 

 

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I’ve previewed six, moving from the spring into the summer.

We head to Australia with the long-awaited Ten Pound Pom by Niall Griffiths (Sheepshagger, Grits, Stump, Jonathan Cape/Vintage). We are delighted to be publishing this entertaining travel and memoir from Niall re-tracing his childhood journey as a child of migrant workers in Australia.

Niall is by turns homesick, sunburnt, bored, drunk and angry. It is a ten pound pom having a real bash at Australian popular culture and a hard look at his life thirty years on. There are lots of quotes about the quality of Niall’s writing, all about how good it is, here’s a few examples,

“One of Britain’s most talented young writers.” (Time Out) 

“Niall is in the top rank of contemporary British authors.” (The Glasgow Herald)

“An actual literary star…” and that’s from the Daily Telegraph.

 

Ten Pound Pom promises to attract a lot of attention buts not likely to win him Australian of the Year or a commendation from the Queensland Tourist board. God Bless Australia? Yeah, right.

 

Make Room for the Jester by Stead Jones which is being released under the Library of Wales imprint.

Set in the north Wales seaside town of Porthmawr over the course of a long hot summer in the 1940s. Make Room for the Jester is Welsh take on The Catcher in the Rye. There’s fraud, farce, drama, drunkenness, temperance, hysteria and tragedy. It also comes with a ringing endorsement and foreword by Philip Pullman

“When I read it … I was enchanted with it…”

 

Into Suez by Stevie Davies was published to widespread critical acclaim in the summer of 2010. It was recently chosen by Margaret Drabble as one of her books of the year in The Guardian. The paperback edition will be released in April 2011. 

 

In May we published a new edition of Mrs D’Silva’s Detective Instincts and the Shaitan of Calcutta.  It is an enjoyable feel-good crime story that perfectly captures the atmosphere of Calcutta in the 60s through the eyes of the Anglo/Indian community as Joan D’Silva, a teacher at Don Bosco’s tries to find out who murdered one of her students, Agnes Lal. The book is currently being adapted into a stage play with a theatre company based in Kolcatta.

 

Everything I Found on the Beach is the second novel from Cynan Jones who won a Betty Trask Award for his first book The Long Dry, which has gone on to be translated into four languages (Italian, French, Arabic, Turkish) and the film rights sold. Everything I Found on the Beach is a thriller based on the premise of a fisherman finding drugs and a dead polish drug smuggler in an inflatable boat on the west Wales coast and deciding to keep the drugs. Sarah Waters is an admirer of Cynan’s work, writing in The Guardian she commented "Jones's sense of place is acute, and his passion for the landscape - for its colours, its creatures, its textures, its scents - is absolutely magnetic”

 

A Fish Trapped inside the Wind is a fabulous novel by a wandering American writer called Christien Gholson. He’s published one well-received collection of poetry in the States On the side of the Crow and is now living in the UK. It is story with magic, fish, a dance troupe called Contexture who once got naked at the Vatican and the lost poems of Rimbaud. It is sort of in the Life of Pi territory with regard to magic and realism and comes with an excellent endorsement from Karen Joy Fowler, author of the Jane Austen Book Club. 

“I fell in love with this novel the moment I read it. The language and imagery were so fresh and vivid I thought Christien must be a poet (and turned out to be right.)  The book has a political sharpness, wit, and worldliness; it has a compelling plot, a vast number of deftly differentiated voices; and it has characters you will never forget.” Karen Joy Fowler

I do hope you will be intrigued and captivated by some of these books. If you would like to know more about any of them please email us. We’ve moved to our fabulous new offices at Swansea University, so please note the new address if you are writing.

Richard Davies

Publisher

 

 

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My Family Is Only 72% Mad

To learn about what it means to be 72% mad, here's Boyd Clack's interview with Cathy Owen in the Western Mail for you. Also a hint at a possible second instalment to come...?

Boyd Clack: writer, actor, funnyman, depressive. Cathy Owen chats to a cultural icon about his rollercoaster life.

He’s been a tax officer, hotel porter, builder, waiter, park keeper, psychiatric nurse, telephonist, scientific leather measurement officer, sold vacuum cleaners door to door, worked in a porn shop, been part of a cult and a member of a band wonderfully named The Lemmings.

And this whirlwind of activity all took place before he found his true vocation and established a career as an actor and writer.

From his childhood in the Valleys, to being a member of a hippie cult called Dawn of Isis in Australia, to living in a squat in Amsterdam, Boyd Clack has been there, seen that and earned himself a wardrobe full of T-shirts.

Now he has undertaken the task of charting part of the early years of his life in a new autobiography, Kisses Sweeter Than Wine.

Even now, aged 59, he is a man of many parts – an actor, writer, singer and musician.

The star of Satellite City and High Hopes, right, has worked in every medium, from TV roles to sitcom writing, one man shows to Shakespearean parts, played a vicar in the wickedly funny film Twin Town and is even playing the part of Old Bill in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, which is being released in May next year.

His autobiography is outrageous in parts, uplifting in others, sad in bits, but overall it is a very open, honest account of what has been, and still is, a very interesting life.

In the notes, his autobiography is described as being about “a Valleys boy learning about love, magic and madness in the dying light of the 1960s”. But it is also a journey of discovery as he looks back on his life to try and work through some of the background to the mental breakdown he had in the 1990s.

For nearly 20 years, the 6ft 1in actor with the recognisable mop of red hair, has battled with depression.

In 1992 he had a complete mental breakdown. His psychiatrist told him it was probably the culmination of long-standing clinical depression and that he had probably been struggling with it since his late teens.

And it is one of the reasons that he has written this, the first half of his autobiography:

“I’ve used the information about my mental condition to try and explain and rationalise my behaviour,” says Boyd, who has used his experiences in his role as patron of Welsh mental health support group, New Horizons.

“My memory is not perfect and I am aware that my versions of events may not tally perfectly with those of other people. Indeed, I don’t doubt I may be wrong in some instances. I had times when I was not sure if I was recounting memories or memories of memories.”

Boyd’s life story has had more than its fair share of drama and in parts reads like a soap opera.

He has “wandered” over the world, living in Amsterdam, Australia and Canada before returning to Wales to live in Cardiff. He came to acting late in life, in his mid 30s, and literally stumbled on it by accident. He’d always enjoyed performing and had been in several bands, but becoming an actor came about completely by chance during a walk down North Road in Cardiff.

“I saw the Welsh College of Music and Drama. I stopped to take a look,” says Boyd. “It was a newish, red-brick building set back off the road. There was a modernist statue on the grass... I went into the foyer. There was a sign on the wall saying they were holding auditions for the next year and applications had to be in by that day. I asked the doorman how to apply and he handed me a form, which I filled out on the spot.

“I got a letter the next day telling me that I had to go for an audition the following Monday at 10am.

“It happened so quickly. One week I was a trembling neurotic with an uncertain future, the next I had my foot on the first rung of an exotic, exciting ladder to artistic fulfilment and fame. I never doubted that I could do the business. It never crossed my mind. This was where my future lay. I felt almost sane.”

Boyd’s life story is certainly a roller coaster of emotions. And his difficult early years are laid bare in his brutally honest autobiography.

He was only three when his Welsh-born father, George, died of leukaemia in Vancouver, Canada, where the family were living. He had been in the Royal Regiment of Canada and was a former prisoner of war who had been interned in a Stalag prison camp during World War II. His dad weighed just seven stone on his return home, and all his teeth had fallen out due to malnutrition.

He never really recovered and died just a few years later, aged 45.

His mother, Ellen, found it hard to cope with three children, Boyd, his brother Blaine and sister Audrey and moved back home to Tonyrefail.

Boyd was brought up by his mum’s sister, Mary, who he called Naine, and husband Will, who he called Ooley.

When they moved from Canada, the Clacks first lived with them in a tiny house, but after a few months Boyd’s mother, brother and sister were asked to leave. Boyd was to stay with his aunt and uncle until Ellen got things sorted, but became their surrogate child and saw very little of his “blood” family during his early years. They took over his care and Boyd would only go and stay with mum occasionally.

He is disparaging about his mother, describing her as a gambler who let his brother and sister live in squalor.

One visit to her house ended up with him catching pneumonia and having to stay in hospital for more than a month. His mum had let him go out and play in the snow for hours, despite the fact he was recovering from having his tonsils taken out.

“I got better eventually and Ool and Naine decided, since I’d probably die if I went back to live with my mother, me being delicate and her being such an uncaring, thoughtless woman, that they would keep me with them,” he writes.

“My mother was a terrible mother. She should have been imprisoned but no one cared. No one did a thing.”

He got through his childhood, went to Tonyrefail Grammar School, where he stood out for being “gauche”, got six O Levels, two A Levels and left to get his first job as a trainee taxation officer in the Civil Service.

But he found the work “tedious” and an urge to travel took over.

“They say a mile of travel is worth a hundred books and in my experience it’s true. I’m not talking about going on holiday. I’m talking about going to live in another country, growing to realise that what unites us is far greater than that which keeps us apart.”

Boyd has kept true to his roots and has great passion for his local community and underprivileged children in the valleys, devotes time to visiting school events and works with the Valleys Kids charity. One of his projects helped youngsters to make a low-budget short film.

“I used to believe that my family was the maddest on the planet, but it’s not true. We are about 72% mad on the scale of zero being oneness with reality and 100 being belief that you are a 1cm cube of fat,” he says.

“There are a lot crazier than us about and over the years I’ve met quite a few of them.” As well as the new Pirates film, he is also set to appear in BBC Wales’ Baker Boys, a remake of the Fabulous Baker Boys, starring with Eve Myles. And he is also planning to write the second instalment of his life story. “I have found it a cathartic experience. It ended just as I was starting out in acting, so there is lots more to come,” he says.

Kisses Sweeter Than Wine (Parthian, £14.99)

Read More http://www.walesonline.co.uk/showbiz-and-lifestyle/books/news/2010/12/11...