Well, I can't tell you how many books Salt Publishing has been midwife to, over the years. A lot.
And it is extraordinary, extraordinary...to see that there are a few familiar books in their All-Time Bestseller list, posted this week on their website.
Showing posts with label Salt Publishing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Salt Publishing. Show all posts
Monday, 10 August 2009
Tuesday, 9 December 2008
CHARLES LAMBERT: SOMETHING RICH AND STRANGE
My batty writer has put this on her blog. So I'm having it too.
It is a real privilege to host the Cylone stop of Something Rich and Strange, the blog tour for Charles Lambert's super collection, The Scent of Cinnamon. Charles and I had a quick natter, and decided to concentrate on two stories, Air and Moving the Needle Towards the Thread.
Hi Charles. I am interested but not surprised to see that you had chosen to set both these wonderful stories on islands. That works on so many levels. There is a deep and resonant sense of loneliness, of 'something fracturing, separating', of displacement arising from the setting, and from the characters,. In Air, an important layer of the theme being explored here seems to be voiced by the man met in the bar. Am I right? Can you talk about this? The choice of island for setting for example... was it a deliberate thing? Did it appear as a 'surprise' to you, the writer, from some part of the creative spirit that allows preoccupations to surface in this way... see what I mean?
Well, the two stories came from different places, creatively speaking. Moving the Needle towards the Thread was triggered by one of those what if? things I spoke about with Elizabeth: in this case, the idea of the compromising photograph and the circumstances in which it was taken and found. After which I had to do some work on who and where. I’d just come back from a holiday on Cephalonia, where I’d come across the wonderful, and awful, concept of the pharmacos, essentially a scapegoat but with the idea of healing so firmly implanted in the word, and I know that fed into my choice of setting. This is one of those stories that I wrote and re-wrote (my patient Zoetrope reviewers may remember this!) and I only got it right when I realized it was her story, not theirs, and turned it round to first person. But the fact that it’s set on an island obviously isn’t casual. The story deals with isolation, of the individual and of the couple, and how this both protects us and renders us vulnerable.
Islands, like holidays, are experimental conditions in a way; there’s no escape. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the holiday sensation - I hope short-lived - of being trapped within a relationship and of having nothing else to fall back on because you’re stuck in some place that isn’t yours, with the one person who should be everything and suddenly, disastrously, isn’t. Moving the Needle towards the Thread carries this to extremes. The island I drew on for some of the details, by the way, isn’t Greek, but Italian. It’s Ponza, just off the coast from where I live.
The second story, Air, is also the result of an island holiday, this time on Rhodes, and most of the details in the story are drawn from our experiences. We really did go to the island with the half-baked idea of buying a bar and settling, and so on, and anyone who’s entertained similar thoughts may be able to corroborate the whole Greek business of buying the ‘air’ in order to take a place over. The bar we went to may still exist, and I’m sure the aquarium is just as depressing now as it was then.
So I had a bundle of scenes that felt like material for a story. What I didn’t have was a dynamic, until the final scene came back to me, much distorted, from another incident on another holiday some time before. Once again, the story focuses on a relationship and what happens to it under stress, but here the island becomes a metaphor not only for laboratory conditions, but also for escape. The contrast between the two characters – home-loving, stick-in-the-mud Julian and restless, ever-seeking David – is also, as you say, a contrast between normality and a sense of being special, and this is made explicit when David talks to Brian, the man they meet at the bar, who says: ‘Special? We’re two a bloody penny, we are. You want to know what’s special about us? I’ll tell you what’s special about us. We don’t belong here or there or anywhere else.” The story isn’t sure about this, about who’s right, about whether belonging and exile might be the same thing, and its uncertainty is what drives the narrative on.
Charles, reading at his launch party, in Borders, Oxford Street, London.
Thanks. Now... let's continue exploring your work from this perspective... "We don’t belong here or anywhere else." In the wonderful modern fairy story you read at your Borders launch, The Growing, a child and a parent who live miles away from the city wear masks to make a visit there. Seems to me this explores a similar thing... our need to fit in, to be part of the team. The dissonance that plagues us if we do not, or 'think' we don't. Do we as writers wear masks, in that we explore the world and our places in it through our fiction, our characters, who are invented things, but who still retain the essence of 'us', the writers?
Well, to misquote Frank O’Hara, I am the least introspective of men, so I’m not quite sure what to do with this question, which actually seems to me to be two questions, one about wanting to belong and one about what we’re up to when we write. As far as the first question goes, I’d certainly agree that one of the themes that occupies me is what it means to fit in, what fitting in involves and asks of us. What’s interesting about the girl in The Growing, though, is that she isn’t so much driven by a desire to belong as by a dissatisfaction with the world she’s being offered, and by the fact she’s expected to hide her true self - which she finds beautiful - in order to conform to it, as though fitting in weren’t really a need at all, but a failure of the will. David and Julian are also dissatisfied, in their different ways, by Brian’s analysis in the tavern, and I think they’re right.
Wanting to belong is often a way of saying that we’re prepared to settle for less, and neither of them is willing to do that, which is also, of course, why their relationship is bound to end. The story sides with Julian but I’d be inclined to stick up for David and his claim to be special, primarily because I also regard myself as special (which, I hasten to add, doesn’t mean ‘better’).
And this leads me, indirectly, to the second half of the question. My twin sense of myself as gay and as someone who identifies himself as a writer emerged at the age of eleven or twelve, under the benign influence of Kenneth Allott’s Penguin anthology of contemporary verse, from which I somehow learned that Auden was homosexual. My reading/writing and my sexual self-discovery went hand-in-hand from that point on. Later on, and I’m back to O’Hara, I came across the line, ‘It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate,’ and I think that what I try to do with my writing is not so much wear the various masks of fiction as use the various voices at my disposal to investigate what matters to me, and to make something unique from it. Which is, I’m now aware, pretty much what you’re saying, Vanessa, albeit in slightly different terms.
I think what I want to say is that I don’t see the writing of fiction as the wearing of a mask in the sense that I hide behind what I write; I’ve always seen writing as an opportunity to offer to others the open book of myself, in a cavalier rather than a confessional sense. I particularly like your framing of the question as ‘exploring the world and our places in it’, rather than ourselves, which has always struck me as a rather solipsistic and doomed enterprise, except as an inevitable collateral effect – of course what I write reveals something about me. How could it fail to? What good writing does, though, surely, is engage - through the writer - with what’s outside the writer. And that’s what’s interesting, finally. One of my favourite quotes comes from Ruskin, and I’ll use it to round this off: “A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel”.
Charles, you've given us a fantastic insight into your work. May I wish The Scent of Cinnamon every success... not that it will need it. The collection is superb. Many congratulations indeed.
It is a real privilege to host the Cylone stop of Something Rich and Strange, the blog tour for Charles Lambert's super collection, The Scent of Cinnamon. Charles and I had a quick natter, and decided to concentrate on two stories, Air and Moving the Needle Towards the Thread.
Hi Charles. I am interested but not surprised to see that you had chosen to set both these wonderful stories on islands. That works on so many levels. There is a deep and resonant sense of loneliness, of 'something fracturing, separating', of displacement arising from the setting, and from the characters,. In Air, an important layer of the theme being explored here seems to be voiced by the man met in the bar. Am I right? Can you talk about this? The choice of island for setting for example... was it a deliberate thing? Did it appear as a 'surprise' to you, the writer, from some part of the creative spirit that allows preoccupations to surface in this way... see what I mean?
Well, the two stories came from different places, creatively speaking. Moving the Needle towards the Thread was triggered by one of those what if? things I spoke about with Elizabeth: in this case, the idea of the compromising photograph and the circumstances in which it was taken and found. After which I had to do some work on who and where. I’d just come back from a holiday on Cephalonia, where I’d come across the wonderful, and awful, concept of the pharmacos, essentially a scapegoat but with the idea of healing so firmly implanted in the word, and I know that fed into my choice of setting. This is one of those stories that I wrote and re-wrote (my patient Zoetrope reviewers may remember this!) and I only got it right when I realized it was her story, not theirs, and turned it round to first person. But the fact that it’s set on an island obviously isn’t casual. The story deals with isolation, of the individual and of the couple, and how this both protects us and renders us vulnerable.
Islands, like holidays, are experimental conditions in a way; there’s no escape. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the holiday sensation - I hope short-lived - of being trapped within a relationship and of having nothing else to fall back on because you’re stuck in some place that isn’t yours, with the one person who should be everything and suddenly, disastrously, isn’t. Moving the Needle towards the Thread carries this to extremes. The island I drew on for some of the details, by the way, isn’t Greek, but Italian. It’s Ponza, just off the coast from where I live.
The second story, Air, is also the result of an island holiday, this time on Rhodes, and most of the details in the story are drawn from our experiences. We really did go to the island with the half-baked idea of buying a bar and settling, and so on, and anyone who’s entertained similar thoughts may be able to corroborate the whole Greek business of buying the ‘air’ in order to take a place over. The bar we went to may still exist, and I’m sure the aquarium is just as depressing now as it was then.
So I had a bundle of scenes that felt like material for a story. What I didn’t have was a dynamic, until the final scene came back to me, much distorted, from another incident on another holiday some time before. Once again, the story focuses on a relationship and what happens to it under stress, but here the island becomes a metaphor not only for laboratory conditions, but also for escape. The contrast between the two characters – home-loving, stick-in-the-mud Julian and restless, ever-seeking David – is also, as you say, a contrast between normality and a sense of being special, and this is made explicit when David talks to Brian, the man they meet at the bar, who says: ‘Special? We’re two a bloody penny, we are. You want to know what’s special about us? I’ll tell you what’s special about us. We don’t belong here or there or anywhere else.” The story isn’t sure about this, about who’s right, about whether belonging and exile might be the same thing, and its uncertainty is what drives the narrative on.
Charles, reading at his launch party, in Borders, Oxford Street, London.Thanks. Now... let's continue exploring your work from this perspective... "We don’t belong here or anywhere else." In the wonderful modern fairy story you read at your Borders launch, The Growing, a child and a parent who live miles away from the city wear masks to make a visit there. Seems to me this explores a similar thing... our need to fit in, to be part of the team. The dissonance that plagues us if we do not, or 'think' we don't. Do we as writers wear masks, in that we explore the world and our places in it through our fiction, our characters, who are invented things, but who still retain the essence of 'us', the writers?
Well, to misquote Frank O’Hara, I am the least introspective of men, so I’m not quite sure what to do with this question, which actually seems to me to be two questions, one about wanting to belong and one about what we’re up to when we write. As far as the first question goes, I’d certainly agree that one of the themes that occupies me is what it means to fit in, what fitting in involves and asks of us. What’s interesting about the girl in The Growing, though, is that she isn’t so much driven by a desire to belong as by a dissatisfaction with the world she’s being offered, and by the fact she’s expected to hide her true self - which she finds beautiful - in order to conform to it, as though fitting in weren’t really a need at all, but a failure of the will. David and Julian are also dissatisfied, in their different ways, by Brian’s analysis in the tavern, and I think they’re right.
Wanting to belong is often a way of saying that we’re prepared to settle for less, and neither of them is willing to do that, which is also, of course, why their relationship is bound to end. The story sides with Julian but I’d be inclined to stick up for David and his claim to be special, primarily because I also regard myself as special (which, I hasten to add, doesn’t mean ‘better’).
And this leads me, indirectly, to the second half of the question. My twin sense of myself as gay and as someone who identifies himself as a writer emerged at the age of eleven or twelve, under the benign influence of Kenneth Allott’s Penguin anthology of contemporary verse, from which I somehow learned that Auden was homosexual. My reading/writing and my sexual self-discovery went hand-in-hand from that point on. Later on, and I’m back to O’Hara, I came across the line, ‘It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate,’ and I think that what I try to do with my writing is not so much wear the various masks of fiction as use the various voices at my disposal to investigate what matters to me, and to make something unique from it. Which is, I’m now aware, pretty much what you’re saying, Vanessa, albeit in slightly different terms.
I think what I want to say is that I don’t see the writing of fiction as the wearing of a mask in the sense that I hide behind what I write; I’ve always seen writing as an opportunity to offer to others the open book of myself, in a cavalier rather than a confessional sense. I particularly like your framing of the question as ‘exploring the world and our places in it’, rather than ourselves, which has always struck me as a rather solipsistic and doomed enterprise, except as an inevitable collateral effect – of course what I write reveals something about me. How could it fail to? What good writing does, though, surely, is engage - through the writer - with what’s outside the writer. And that’s what’s interesting, finally. One of my favourite quotes comes from Ruskin, and I’ll use it to round this off: “A man wrapped up in himself makes a very small parcel”.
Charles, you've given us a fantastic insight into your work. May I wish The Scent of Cinnamon every success... not that it will need it. The collection is superb. Many congratulations indeed.
Monday, 10 March 2008
SALT WINS AWARD
Brilliant news! Salt Publishing have won an award!!
The Independent Publishers Guild is proud to announce the eleven winners of the 2008 Independent Publishing Awards.
This from their blog:
Salt Publishing received the Nielsen Innovation of the Year Award for its imaginative efforts to increase sales of collections of poetry and short stories despite very challenging market conditions. It impressed with its range of web-based marketing initiatives and partnerships and energetic development of its brand. “Salt is bucking the trend in poetry by growing its sales,” said the judges. “Its innovation in lots of small ways adds up to a major achievement."
CONGRATULATIONS JEN AND CHRIS!
The Independent Publishers Guild is proud to announce the eleven winners of the 2008 Independent Publishing Awards.
This from their blog:
Salt Publishing received the Nielsen Innovation of the Year Award for its imaginative efforts to increase sales of collections of poetry and short stories despite very challenging market conditions. It impressed with its range of web-based marketing initiatives and partnerships and energetic development of its brand. “Salt is bucking the trend in poetry by growing its sales,” said the judges. “Its innovation in lots of small ways adds up to a major achievement."
CONGRATULATIONS JEN AND CHRIS!
Thursday, 6 March 2008
REVIEWED ON NORMBLOG
Words from a Glass Bubble has been reviewed by Adele Geras today on her husband (Norman Geras)'s blog, Normblog.
(I love Normblog. There is always something to provoke, to challenge, to make me think...)
Adele Geras reviews two Salt Collections: Balancing on the Edge of the World, by Elizabeth Baines, and Glass Bubble.
She writes a very good introduction in which she champions the short story.Here is her article in its entirety:
Two short story collections (by Adèle Geras)
Salt is an independent publisher based in Cambridge and it specializes in short stories. I've read two collections by Salt authors recently: Elizabeth Baines's Balancing on the Edge of the World when it came out a couple of months ago, and - the other day - Vanessa Gebbie's Words from a Glass Bubble, to be launched next week.
Some people simply don't like reading short stories and I find this so inexplicable that every so often I'll try my powers of persuasion to win the form a few more readers. Publishers (though not Salt, obviously) think that collections are not a paying proposition and efforts to bind them up individually as tiny little booklets and sell them at railway stations and the like don't seem to have flourished. They crop up less and less frequently in magazines. The broadsheets will carry a story by a superstar writer at Christmas, and occasionally at Halloween, because ghost stories, at least, are perennial favourites. Val McDermid tried her hardest a couple of years ago to get short stories noticed with a superb website and perhaps the internet is part of the future of this genre. But collections like these two show that the form is still alive and well in its printed version.
Those who don't like short stories are disappointed, perhaps, because they expect them to be small novels and they're not. It's like wishing a truly delicious canapé, or an exquisite strawberry tart, were a three-course meal. That isn't going to happen. With a few exceptions, short stories are short - over in a few pages for the most part - and therefore you'd think ideal for journeys, waiting rooms, the time before you fall asleep and any small time slot when getting stuck into a novel means you won't get further than the next few pages and have to leave it hanging till a later time.
Stories, when they work (and in the hands of these two writers they do work), offer us a chance to look into someone else's life. They can throw a stone into our mind that keeps rippling out to the edges of our thoughts all day long. That, I think, is what the blurbese 'haunting' means: you are literally pursued by the story you've just read, as if by a particularly vivid dream. They can terrify you (M.R. James, Franz Kafka), make you laugh (Damon Runyon), and even bring to life, however briefly, a whole distinct world (Katherine Mansfield, Anton Chekhov). They can be extended jokes, or delicious bits of scandal, or an overheard conversation. There are stories to suit every taste.
Elizabeth Baines's speciality is unpacking relationships. She catches perfectly the embarrassment, rivalry, squabbling, envy and love that exist between parents and children and between siblings. 'The Way to Behave' has a wronged wife going to speak to her husband's mistress. Baines is wincingly funny about the creative process and 'The Shooting Script' ought to be required reading for anyone who fancies themselves writing for television. She's both lyrical and clear-sighted when she looks at the world through a child's eyes. Try the stories 'Power' and 'Daniel Smith disappears off the face of the earth'. She moves between the city and the countryside and her internal monologues sound genuine, which isn't a surprise as Baines is a prize-winning playwright. Many of these tales would make good short dramas and perhaps that's one way of approaching them. The difference between drama and stories, though, is this: you have to provide the setting, costume and props in words and Baines does this with enormous aplomb.
The cover image on Vanessa Gebbie's book (which shows the back view of a beautiful red-haired girl going along a road and which reminds me of the Clark's shoe advertisements from the 50s) is an ironic comment on the contents of the book. The stories here are often heart-breaking. The death of children is a recurring theme and tales like 'I can squash the king, Tommo' (with its deliberate echoes of 'Under Milk Wood') are hard to read with dry eyes. Gebbie is never sentimental and the grief felt by her protagonists is brilliantly described. The ordinariness of pain: the way you settle into it, the way you face what's dished out to you, the way you cope, are examined in language that's plain and even brutal when it needs to be, and tender and poetic when that's appropriate. Some of the stories are set in Wales; the seaside is the background for some others. There's a story about an Inuit child which is desperately sad, but still uplifting. Harry in 'Harry's Catch' - which dwells in some detail on the technicalities of fishing - faces the truth about his marriage for the first time. A lowly employee at a hotel works out who wears the shoes he polishes, and in my favourite story, 'Dodie's Gift', you get an entire thriller plot played out in ten pages. It's terrific stuff: wide-ranging, interesting and, like the Baines, very well-written.
I do urge anyone who loves short stories to read these two collections and help me spread the word. (Adèle Geras)
(I love Normblog. There is always something to provoke, to challenge, to make me think...)
Adele Geras reviews two Salt Collections: Balancing on the Edge of the World, by Elizabeth Baines, and Glass Bubble.
She writes a very good introduction in which she champions the short story.Here is her article in its entirety:
Two short story collections (by Adèle Geras)
Salt is an independent publisher based in Cambridge and it specializes in short stories. I've read two collections by Salt authors recently: Elizabeth Baines's Balancing on the Edge of the World when it came out a couple of months ago, and - the other day - Vanessa Gebbie's Words from a Glass Bubble, to be launched next week.
Some people simply don't like reading short stories and I find this so inexplicable that every so often I'll try my powers of persuasion to win the form a few more readers. Publishers (though not Salt, obviously) think that collections are not a paying proposition and efforts to bind them up individually as tiny little booklets and sell them at railway stations and the like don't seem to have flourished. They crop up less and less frequently in magazines. The broadsheets will carry a story by a superstar writer at Christmas, and occasionally at Halloween, because ghost stories, at least, are perennial favourites. Val McDermid tried her hardest a couple of years ago to get short stories noticed with a superb website and perhaps the internet is part of the future of this genre. But collections like these two show that the form is still alive and well in its printed version.
Those who don't like short stories are disappointed, perhaps, because they expect them to be small novels and they're not. It's like wishing a truly delicious canapé, or an exquisite strawberry tart, were a three-course meal. That isn't going to happen. With a few exceptions, short stories are short - over in a few pages for the most part - and therefore you'd think ideal for journeys, waiting rooms, the time before you fall asleep and any small time slot when getting stuck into a novel means you won't get further than the next few pages and have to leave it hanging till a later time.
Stories, when they work (and in the hands of these two writers they do work), offer us a chance to look into someone else's life. They can throw a stone into our mind that keeps rippling out to the edges of our thoughts all day long. That, I think, is what the blurbese 'haunting' means: you are literally pursued by the story you've just read, as if by a particularly vivid dream. They can terrify you (M.R. James, Franz Kafka), make you laugh (Damon Runyon), and even bring to life, however briefly, a whole distinct world (Katherine Mansfield, Anton Chekhov). They can be extended jokes, or delicious bits of scandal, or an overheard conversation. There are stories to suit every taste.
Elizabeth Baines's speciality is unpacking relationships. She catches perfectly the embarrassment, rivalry, squabbling, envy and love that exist between parents and children and between siblings. 'The Way to Behave' has a wronged wife going to speak to her husband's mistress. Baines is wincingly funny about the creative process and 'The Shooting Script' ought to be required reading for anyone who fancies themselves writing for television. She's both lyrical and clear-sighted when she looks at the world through a child's eyes. Try the stories 'Power' and 'Daniel Smith disappears off the face of the earth'. She moves between the city and the countryside and her internal monologues sound genuine, which isn't a surprise as Baines is a prize-winning playwright. Many of these tales would make good short dramas and perhaps that's one way of approaching them. The difference between drama and stories, though, is this: you have to provide the setting, costume and props in words and Baines does this with enormous aplomb.
The cover image on Vanessa Gebbie's book (which shows the back view of a beautiful red-haired girl going along a road and which reminds me of the Clark's shoe advertisements from the 50s) is an ironic comment on the contents of the book. The stories here are often heart-breaking. The death of children is a recurring theme and tales like 'I can squash the king, Tommo' (with its deliberate echoes of 'Under Milk Wood') are hard to read with dry eyes. Gebbie is never sentimental and the grief felt by her protagonists is brilliantly described. The ordinariness of pain: the way you settle into it, the way you face what's dished out to you, the way you cope, are examined in language that's plain and even brutal when it needs to be, and tender and poetic when that's appropriate. Some of the stories are set in Wales; the seaside is the background for some others. There's a story about an Inuit child which is desperately sad, but still uplifting. Harry in 'Harry's Catch' - which dwells in some detail on the technicalities of fishing - faces the truth about his marriage for the first time. A lowly employee at a hotel works out who wears the shoes he polishes, and in my favourite story, 'Dodie's Gift', you get an entire thriller plot played out in ten pages. It's terrific stuff: wide-ranging, interesting and, like the Baines, very well-written.
I do urge anyone who loves short stories to read these two collections and help me spread the word. (Adèle Geras)
Thursday, 3 January 2008
More endorsements, more postcards, my webpage
The postcards in Christmas cards was a good idea. Now, whenever I see friends, it is they who start the conversations...
"Thanks for the card... the book looks great... love the cover... what's this, a book!...tell me about it... etc etc
and in the jeans pocket are a few more cards. So if there's someone in on the chat who wasn't on my Christmas card list, I can hand them one legitimately!
I had some more endorsements, and they are lovely. One says I have 'the heart and soul of a writer'...
Salt have put my webpage up, detailing the stories in the collection (needs a bit of revision) and my bio.
But most important, for this writer at least, my endorsements.
CLICK HERE FOR MY WEBPAGE AT SALT PUBLISHING
"Thanks for the card... the book looks great... love the cover... what's this, a book!...tell me about it... etc etc
and in the jeans pocket are a few more cards. So if there's someone in on the chat who wasn't on my Christmas card list, I can hand them one legitimately!
I had some more endorsements, and they are lovely. One says I have 'the heart and soul of a writer'...
Salt have put my webpage up, detailing the stories in the collection (needs a bit of revision) and my bio.
But most important, for this writer at least, my endorsements.
CLICK HERE FOR MY WEBPAGE AT SALT PUBLISHING
Wednesday, 5 December 2007
I Have A Cover!
Now that I exist, I deserve my own blog.
I am due to be born on 1st March 2008, the product of a fruitful partnership between writer Vanessa Gebbie and Salt Publishing, Cambridge, UK.
My writer also has a page on the Salt website HERE
I will post news here. meanwhile, I have three more months to go before my birthday! Wish me luck.
.
I am due to be born on 1st March 2008, the product of a fruitful partnership between writer Vanessa Gebbie and Salt Publishing, Cambridge, UK.
My writer also has a page on the Salt website HERE
I will post news here. meanwhile, I have three more months to go before my birthday! Wish me luck.
.
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