The Glue Factory August newsletter
This newsletter is to let you know about forthcoming events and/or publications
involving writers and creative practitioners I admire, all of whom have taken part in
our online gatherings over the last few years and who will therefore be familiar to
many of you.
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I’ll open this bumper summer number with some personal news, if I may.
My son Edwin (who will be 25 on 3rd August) has just received the result of his final
French Civil Service exams, which he passed (one of only 39 to do so in a cohort of
more than a thousand).
His education began in London at the lycée français Charles de Gaulle and he went
on to study in Paris at the Lycée général Henri IV and École normale supérieure,
followed by two years at SciencesPo (the ‘Po’ is for politics), where he completed a
Masters degree before sitting entrance exams for the French Civil Service. His
postgraduate life will begin in September with a five-month posting to Strasbourg,
then he’ll return to Paris and then be posted on to an overseas embassy.
Did I mention that he was awarded first prize in English at the Concours général in
2018 (and also won the third prize in the previous year? Founded in 1744, this
hugely prestigious annual prize is open to all students throughout the Francophone
world and in 2018 attracted around 18,000 entrants. More on that here.
So I can now concentrate in being an embarrassment while he embarks on a career
in politics that makes me hopeful for the future, when all the current ogres are dead
and buried. And vilified. Well done Edwin - we’re very proud of you.
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More family news
Well, she counts as family. I actually yelped when I read this announcement from
The Bookseller on my Bluesky timeline (@davidcollard.bsky.social)
I’ve known Aea since we met one
afternoon in the Queen Elizabeth Hall
in December 2019. I was casting for
the first ever live 'Leap in the Dark'
and looking for a fluent French
speaker to perform Apollinaire’s epic
modernist poem ‘Zone’ (in French)
alongside Michael Hughes and myself
(in English), and after that she
appeared regularly, and memorably, in
many of our online lockdown gatherings. She is lavishly talented, and has a long
career ahead of her.
Aea on 29th February 2020, performing Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’ at the inaugural Leap in the Dark.Short notice
This very afternoon (Friday 1st August) at 2:30pm young performers from
@elementsociety will be sharing a brand new show, Facetimes, as part of
Together Festival. To reserve your FREE tickets, go to bit.ly/449EbEa
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Forthcoming fiction
August is Women in Translation month and a highlight will
be this collection of short stories by Ágota Kristóf,
appearing for the first time in English, translated by Chris
Andrews. It’s called I Don’f Care (and by the look of it the
Penguin cover designer didn’t much care either.)
On publication day (21st August) there’s a ticketed event
at the LRB bookshop LRB bookshop in Bloomsbury with
Jen Hodgson in conversation with the Canadian writer
Camilla Grudova.
Back in 2014 CB editions published Ágota Kristóf’s brief
memoir The Illiterate (translated by Nina Bogin) and brought back into print her
masterpiece The Notebook (translated by Alan Sheridan). Still in print with CBe
are The Illiterate and the Trilogy (which features The Notebook, The Proof, The Third
Lie). It was through CBe that I discovered this writer and we all owe a debt of thanks
to publisher Charles Boyle for keeping her work in circulation in Britain for the past
ten years, as her reputation in the Anglophone world has continued to grow.
Next year the Trilogy will move to Penguin, so you could do worse than snapping up
the beautiful CB editions paperback. Rónán Hession, always a champion of works
in translation and a great admirer of the author, discusses The Notebook and other
writings by Kristof in eloquent detail here._____________________________________
We Live Here Now by CD Rose, published on 7th August by Melville House.
I had the chance to read this ahead of publication and loved its wit, insight, energy
and originality. If you’re already familiar with Chris Rose’s writing this will come as
no surprise. Warmly recommended!
From the publisher’s website:
‘When a famous conceptual artist’s installation disappears, the aftershocks affect
those involved in the project so dramatically their lives are changed forever. Already
being compared to Calvino and Borges, this is a whirlwind novel set in the glamorous
and sometimes criminal world of visual art. It toys with questions of value and reality
in a world full of illusion and fakery. Rose says he wanted to consider metaphysical
questions such as ‘what is real?‘
,
’How can we know that?‘
,
’When is now?’ and
thought the commercial art world would be a good place to start. This is intelligent,
playful, intriguing stuff which is also reminiscent of DeLillo and Auster.’
Order here.
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Beast, a dazzlingly original novel by by Lulu Allison was
launched at the end of July (see last month’s newsletter).
She is currently offering paperback copies of her previous
book Salt Lick (nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction
2022) and is selling it directly for just £7. You can give her a
shout @luluallison.bsky.social, or buy it on eBay here.
Published this month by the admirably named Whiskeytit
Books, Child of Light is the new novel by Jesi Bender.
Thirteen-year-old Ambrétte Memenon has lived her entire
life estranged from her family. After a series of financial
failures, they reunite in rural upstate NY in the Spring of
1896. Together in the new house but basically strangers,
Ambrétte endeavors to connect to her parents through their
interests: Spiritualism and electricity. Pre-order from the publisher here.
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Podcast Corner
I’ve just found out about Little Atoms, hosted by Neil Denny and the latest podcast
features Wendy Erskine talking about The Benefactors (and there’s more on this
later in the newsletter). Do listen here.
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On the run
Novelist and poet Jonathan Gibbs, his wife Sarah and 60,000 others are taking part
in the annual Great North Run (a half marathon) on Sunday 7th September. Sarah
has worked for many years in the National Health Service and Jonathan is
fundraising for an NHS charity. You can sponsor him here.Many of you will recall Jonathan’s
epic pandemic poem Spring Journal, whichfeatured regularly on our lockdown online gatherings.
You can order a copy here.
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Shoulder to shoulder
Twenty-five years ago, an RTÉ Radio millennium series
called A Giant at My Shoulder asked prominent Irish people
to select the person who has most influenced them. When
the late Edna O'Brien was asked by radio producer Marian
Richardson to choose a person of significance to her she
chose James Joyce. A quarter of a century later the series
has just returned on RTÉ Radio 1.
The first giant in the new series, Edna O’Brien, was chosen by Eimear McBride,
who became a close friend of the author in her final years. It’s a wonderful
programme and you can listen to it here.
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Here’s something worth knowing
‘The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep
somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.’
Pozzo’s words in Waiting for Godot came to mind when I read this paragraph an
excellent book about the great Tommy Cooper called Just Like That by Jeremy
Novick.I asked a retired television sound engineer about this and he confirmed that ‘canned
laughter’ is still sourced and recycled from a large bank, and he wasn’t at all
surprised that Tommy Cooper audiences were a primary source, because of the
range and quality of their response. And it’s true - just watch this one-minue clip and
ignore (if you can) the marvellous performance. Just listen to the laughter.
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Forthcoming poetry
Hedonism, the sixth collection from the poet and novelist
Chris McCabe, is published by Nine Arches Press on 4th
September and is now available to pre-order here. It’s his
first collection since 2018 and keenly anticipated.
From the publisher’s website:
Join a carnival of characters including Bez from Happy
Mondays, Jorge Louis Borges and a medieval pilgrim on a
journey to buy a PlayStation.
Part-written in Scouse dialect and invented
languages, Hedonism offsets the comic with the elegiac in a haunting and
polyphonic work exploring the intersection of grief, place, memory and imagination.
‘If you love Chris McCabe's earlier poems as I do, you will find the voice maturing to
the state of brilliance, delivering us a masterpiece! This new book is one of the best
hoards of poems I have read in years! Nothing makes me happier than having
poems sting me and leave me stunned!’
-
CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden
Boomerang Return
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Non-fiction highlights in August
In Extremis by Jake Goldsmith is published on 9th
September 2025 by Sagging Meniscus Press.
This is Jake’s third collection of essays, all of which
originally appeared in the quarterly journal Exacting
Clam. He writes with unflinching honesty and a
‘physiological urgency to have a say’ driven by his
experience of chronic life-threatening illness.
The publishers says ‘These essays search for principle
in an age of imposture and, rejecting easy formulas, ask
what it might mean to live a considered life when body
and body politic both are in a state of perpetual
emergency.’
Order from the publisher here
Also forthcoming in August is The Carbon Arc, a
sequel to The Hinge of Metaphor (2023), to which I
was delighted to contribute an essay about
Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry. It’s published
by Vanguard Editions, edited by Richard Skinner
and features essays by Marina Benjamin,
Jonathan Coe, Jude Cook, Rob Doyle, Wendy
Erskine, Gareth Evans, Maria Fusco, David
Gaffney, Karen Krizanovich, Sam Mills,
Nicholas Royle, David Savill, Richard Skinner,
Christiana Spens, Christina Tudor-Sideri and Anne Worthington.
It’s not (at the time of writing) available to order. Look out for this. Meanwhile,
anedited version of the essay by Jonathan Coe appeared in The Observer recently,
and will certainly whet your appetite for the book.
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Forthcoming gathering
On Wednesday 20th August Nicola Barker, The Booker shortlisted author
of Darkmans and H(a)ppy launches her comic new novel, TonyInterruptor, in a
conversation at Foyles (Charing Cross Road) with Isabel Waidner.
Further details and tickets here
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Substacks
The Guardian recently listed the 15 best literary substacks here.
FWIW my recommendations include Kevin Boniface, Jonathan Gibbs, Drew Gummerson,
Toby Litt and Jeremy Noel-Todd
Now I’m the first to admit this is a very blokeish list - suggestions welcome!
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On AI etc
As a non-fiction writer I confess I sometimes use ChatGPT (one of the many Large
Language Model apps currently available, all of which are bundled under the generic
term ‘AI’). It’s very good at spell-checking, for instance, and a useful way to createaccurate
and reliable summaries of long documents. You can use it for editing and
checking grammar. Nobody is likely to object to any of this. I have also used a couple
of times in way which may strike some other writers as contentious. In researching
my forthcoming book of essays about Samuel Beckett’s cultural legacy, I have used
Chat GPT to generate opposing views about his work, negative critiques with which I
disagree and against which I can argue. So I got the app to write, or rather
assemble, a negative critique of Beckett’s play Happy Days based on all the
negative reviews and commentaries that appear on the internet. You get a (fairly
predictable) list of objections, all from an essentially middlebrow and philistine
perspective, although without citations. This is useful to me as it gives me certain
points of engagement with a hypothetical antagonist, and allows me to anticipate
objections to my approach. But that’s as far as it goes.
Where things become a cause for concern is when these apps are used by creative
writers to generate texts which are then passed off as their own work.
Tramp Press in Dublin, a leading independent publisher, recently published their own
guidelines and the co-founders, Lisa Cohen and Sara Davis-Goff, have very kindly
allowed me to reproduce their policy document below. Other Indies should consider
adapting (or adopting) these guidelines:
Tramp Press policy on the use of Large Language Models
As of July 2025, our policy on AI tools and Large Language Models (LLMs) is as set
out below. This is a rapidly changing environment, and so we expect to have to
review and renew often.
Use of Authors’ Work by AI
We have spoken out already in objection to the use of Tramp Press books and books
by any author or publisher whose permission was not sought by companies training
LLMs. The harm has been done: authors were not offered compensation for the use
of their work. Silicon Valley companies have benefitted from the risk-taking work of
authors who were supported with funding from Ireland’s Arts Council. AI models
have been able to grow quickly on a foundation of this egregious plagiarism.We’d
like to draw your attention to a petition over at this link:
https://my.uplift.ie/petitions/protest-meta-s-theft-of-irish-writing?source=bluesky-
share-button&utm_medium=myuplift&utm_source=bluesky&share=5c4aa9b8-
fb53-4068-a4cb-02701837d546
The petition was organised by Conor Kostick of the Irish Writers Union, calling
on the Irish government to play its part in protecting its citizens from massive
copyright infringement by large tech companies using copyrighted material to build
AI/ language models.
If you’re wondering whether Meta (to name just one) has used your work or the
work of an author you admire, there’s a searchable database here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/search-libgen-data-
set/682094
We do not give consent for Tramp Press books to be used for such training without
permission.
Use of AI by Authors
When it comes to the use of AI and LLMs by authors we are working with or who
are proposing work to us, our current policy is as follows:
It is understandable that AI can be used as a tool for research, managing some ‘busy
work’ that, in theory, frees people to pursue real creative ambition. This industry has,
for many years, benefited from spellcheck and pre-emptive grammar assistance in
certain word-processing applications.
We draw the line at creative writing that has been generated by AI/LLMs. Even if
you have asked your LLM to re-draft and have taken something of an editorial role
in the generation of a text, it’s not interesting beyond that novelty. We value original
creative writing, and don’t want to waste time sorting through the output of a
plagiarism machine when we’re asking ourselves if yours is a book we want to
invest time and resources in, to bring to our trusted readers and to stand alongside
the exceptional talent we have had the privilege to publish already.
As has been stated before: don’t ask people to read something you couldn’t be
bothered to write.
We are grateful to the authors we get to work with, (some who still use long-hand!)
who take all the time it takes to write brilliant, original stories and to share insights
into their creative process with us. A cool part of this job is that we’re often sentpraise and feedback from readers to forward on to those authors. People thank them
for articulating grief, fear, joy, envy or for making them laugh with recognition. The
common denominator is humanity.
Team Tramp
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Wendy Erskine and the Booker Prize
The BBC’s list of ‘Ten best Summer reads’
includes (at number 7) The Benefactors by
Wendy Erskine (see left).
This really is a fiction highlight of the year,
and strongly recommended. (And Wendy
very generously mentioned my latest book A
Crumpled Swan when invited to suggest
some summer reading for The Irish Times
last month)
The Benefactors was, predictably, not
selected for the Booker Prize shortlist, which
was announced last week. According to John Self writing in The Times, it consists of ’thirteen novels,
eleven publishers, nine nationalities, seven women, six men, five Brits, four books under 200 pages,
three Fabers, two debutants ... and one dud.’ (If you can’t figure out which is the dud, you can read
his excellent (paywalled) summary here.)
I’m not much of a Booker fan and rarely read any of the novels on their longlist (unless I already have,
if you see what I mean). My loyalties lie with indie presses and adventurous, uncommercial fiction.
Invited (which I never am) to create an antidote to the Booker, here are the 13 books I’d nominate for
2025. I focus exclusively on books published in Britain and the Republic of Ireland since May 2024
and, unlike this year’s Booker longlist my choice includes four Irish writers. I haven’t included and
books published outside the UK and Republic of Ireland.
All My Precious Madness by Mark Bowles (Galley Beggar Press)
Invisible Dogs by Charles Boyle (CB editions)
Brian by Jeremy Cooper (Fitzcarraldo)
Toothpull of St Dunstan by Kevin Davey (Aaaargh! Press)
The Benefactors by Wendy Erskine (Sceptre)
Saltburn by Drew Gummerson (Haywood Books)Ghost Mountain by Rónán Hession (Bluemoose Books)
The Accidental Immigrants by Jo Macmillan (Bluemoose Books)
The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride (Faber)
The Black Pool: a Memory of Forgetting by Tim MacGabhann (a memoir, not a novel, but I’m
not bound by Booker rules and this is a book to keep you awake for weeks)
Waterblack by Alex Pheby (Galley Beggar Press)
We Live Here Now by CD Rose, published 7th August (Melville House, and see above)
Mrs Calder and the Hyena by Marjorie Anne Watts (CB editions)
Most of these have featured in these newsletters, so not many surprises. All of them demand
and repay your close attention!
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This just in
I’m planning a belated online launch in August of my latest book, A
Crumpled Swan: fifty essays about Abigail Parry’s ‘In the dream of the
cold restaurant’. This will be on Sunday 17th August from 7pm BST
when I’ll be joined by my genial interrogator Rónán Hession, with
readings by Stephanie Ellyne and others,
This follows the official launch in Dublin on June 12th. Plans for further
events were put on hold as life intervened, so I hope to see many of you
online for this convivial Zoom gathering. Details will follow in a separate
invitation later this month.
More about the book here
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And finally
We’ve been working for the past few months with Jake
Goldsmith to re-launch the Barbellion Prize, which will
happen on 1st September (if all goes according to plan,
and it will). You’ll get special notification linking you to
the new website (designed by Gav Clarke) which will go
live on that day. This is a soft re-launch for the 2026
prize.
The Barbellion is, as you will know, a prize for disabled
writers, which Jake created, funded and ran single-handedly. For health reasons it’s
been on hiatus for the past two years.
I hope we can count on your support and that you’ll be willing and able to donate (via
the website), and to do so generously. Our ambitious but realistic aim is to raise
£10,000 by the end of this year and we have a number of exciting projects under
way to achieve this, which will be announced in the September newsletter. The funds
will allow us to employ a part-time administrator, cover the costs of running the new
website, pay the judges and (of course) fund the prize itself in the years to come.
A board of Trustees chaired by Jake will oversee the running of the prize and Jake will,
of course, have overall control of the whole thing.
That’s all for now. If you’re still reading this, thank you.
David
PS Authors and indie publishers - let me know if you have a book coming out or a
project you’d like to promote and I’ll be happy to include details in future newsletters.
These will be monthly, more or less, throughout the year, and I’d appreciate any
notifications by the end of February. And do let me know if you’d rather not be on the
mailing list and I’ll happily stop badgering you. D.
