An evening with Mark Cousins and Rónán Hession

Sunday 29th September at 7pm (UK time) 

Join us to mark the publication of two outstanding books by two remarkable talents.

Mark Cousins is an English-born, Northern Irish film director and writer who will be joining us

to talk about his new collection of writings on cinema: Dear Orson Welles (and  other essays).

In this wide-ranging, stylish and iconoclastic book, Cousins reflects on his prolific career in filmmaking, meditating on the actors, directors, films, writers and philosophers that have influenced him, as well as on other adventures in filmland and on creativity in general.

Mark is a prolific documentarian, among his best-known works is the 15-hour 2011 documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey.

He presented the BBC cult film series Moviedrome from June 1997 to July 2000, introducing 66 films for the show, including the little-seen Nicolas Roeg film Eureka.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Cousins interviewed directors, producers, and actors including Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Tom Hanks, Sean Connery, Brian De Palma, Steve Martin, Lauren Bacall, Jane Russell, Paul Schrader, Bernardo Bertolucci, Kirk Douglas, Jeanne Moreau, Terence Stamp, Jack Lemmon, Janet Leigh and Rod Steiger.

In 2009, Cousins and Tilda Swinton co-founded the "8/2 Foundation". Together they also created a project where they mounted a 33.5-tonne portable cinema on a large truck which was physically pulled through the Scottish Highlands. The travelling independent film festival was featured prominently in a documentary called Cinema is Everywhere. The festival was repeated in 2011.

 

He is the co-artistic director of Cinema China, The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, and A Pilgrimage, with Tilda Swinton. Together with Antonia Bird, Robert Carlyle, and Irvine Welsh, Cousins is a director of the production company 4Way Pictures.  Between 2001 and 2011, he wrote for Prospect, and now writes for Sight & Sound and Filmkrant.

He was appointed honorary professor of the University of Glasgow in 2013, as well as being awarded honorary doctorates at both the University of Edinburgh in 2007 and University of Stirling in 2014.

Order Dear Orson Welles (and other essays) from the publisher here:

https://irishpages.org/product/dear-orson-welles-other-essays/?v=79cba1185463

NB Courtesy of the publishers a discount code will be available on the night!

Rónán Hession needs no introduction as a leading light in the Carthorse Orchestra Players, who perform an annual live pantomime to raise funds for good causes. 

Audiences will never forget his haunting Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol, his unsettling Humpty Dumpty in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, his salty Mr Smee in Peter Pan and his enigmatic Signor Paravicini in The Mousebook. Rónán is a master of disguise as you can see, a Lon Chaney for the internet age: 

             Jacob Marley                                    Humpty Dumpty

Mr Smee

 

                                                                     Signor Paravicini

You will, like me, be surprised to learn that he has an unexpected side hustle... as a writer! 

He's published no fewer than two novels: Leonard and Hungry Paul (which is the 'Jacob Marley,' so to speak, of his writing career), and Panenka (which is the 'Humpty-Dumpty,' as it were, of his writing career), both of them attracting no small success in the world of books reading. 

And now he's written a third. It's called Ghost Mountain (the 'Mr Smee' if you will, of his writing career), and books reading folk who know about this kind of thing assure me that it's not half bad.  

                                             
                                                 

Whatever will he do next? 

And I don't just mean as a pantomime performer, although we have plans in hand for this December. 

What will be, if I can put it this way, the 'Signor Paravacini' of his writing career? Who can tell? 

One thing is for sure - it will certainly be his fourth novel.

The Dublin launch of Ghost Mountain at Hodges Figgis with (from left) actor Barry McGovern, RH, DC, Guillermo Stitch and Bluemoose Books head honcho Kevin Duffy.

                                                    At Manchester Waterstone's with Kevin Boniface.

                                              DC and Rónán at the London launch in the Bloomsbury Chapel.

Ghost Mountain and Rónán's other novels can be ordered direct from Bluemoose Books here: https://bluemoosebooks.com/books/ghost-mountain

     

                    

August Women

 Sunday 18th August from 7pm (UK time)

Join us for a high summer evening with three exceptional writers.

If you're not already on the mailing list and would like to join us, leave your full name and email address at the foot of this page.

Beverley Bie Brahic        Susanna Crossman            S. D. Curtis

Beverley Bie Brahic is a Canadian poet and translator who lives in Paris and the San Francisco Bay Area. Her poetry collection, White Sheets, was a finalist for the Forward Prize and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her translations include Guillaume Apollinaire:The Little Auto, winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize; Francis Ponge: Unfinished Ode to Mud, a finalist for the Popescu Prize for Poetry in Translationn; Yves Bonnefoy: The Present Hour; and books by Hélène Cixous, including Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, Manhattan, and Hyperdream, Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva. https://www.beverleybiebrahic.com

Her fifth collection, Apple Thieves, is published this month by Carcanet and available to order here:

https://www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=2518

Susanna Crossman is an award-winning Anglo-French fiction writer and essayist, published internationally in print and online. She has also been a stalwart contributor to these online gatherings since 2020.

Home is Where we Start is a memoir about her childhood in a utopian commune and published by Fig Tree/Penguin this month. It's a Guardian  2024 'Book to Look Out For'.

In the turbulent late seventies, six-year-old Susanna Crossman moved with her mother and siblings from a suburban terrace to a crumbling mansion deep in the English countryside. They would share their new home with over fifty other residents from all over the world, armed with worn paperbacks on ecology, Marx and radical feminism, drawn together by utopian dreams of remaking the world. They did not leave for fifteen years.

While the Adults adopted new names and liberated themselves from domestic roles, the Kids ran free. In the community, nobody was too young to discuss nuclear war and children learned not to expect wiped noses or regular bedtimes. Instead, they made a home in a house with no locks or keys, never knowing when they opened doors whether they’d find violent political debates or couples writhing under sheets.

Decades later, and armed with hindsight, Crossman revisits her past, turning to leading thinkers in philosophy, sociology and anthropology to examine the society she grew up in, and the many meanings of family and home. In this luminous memoir, she asks what happens to children who are raised as the product of social experiments and explores how growing up estranged from the outside world shapes her as a parent today.

Her forthcoming novel The Orange Notebooks will be published by Bluemoose Books in 2025. 

https://susanna-crossman.squarespace.com/

S D Curtis is a publisher, author and sometime translator from Croatian/Bosnian. She studied literature and public art at Roehampton University and has an MA in Education (Applied Linguistics). Her novels So Like Fire (1998) and Leave to Remain (2007) were originally self-published and have since been translated and published in Croatia. She has lived and worked for long periods in Rome, Ljubljana and Zagreb and presently does both in Camden, London.

Co-founder of Istros Books (which specialises in Balkan writing), Susan Curtis is also a poet and her latest collection  Axonas/Axis is available to buy here:

https://burleyfisherbooks.com/products/9781912545414

'In Axonas/Axis, Curtis gives voice to the experience of trauma and recovery through the poetic language of imagery rather than graphic detail, attempting to convey the fundamental twist in the narrative - perhaps even a breakage - that needs to be mended through a synthesis of mind, heart and body working towards the integration of the whole. The whole self. Using Ancient Greek words/concepts and mythology as a springboard to launch into her own personal etymology - the origin and intimate meaning of words dear to her - juxtaposed against what we commonly expect from that word. Ultimately, these poems attempt to tread on Holy ground, the territory where symbol is created from suffering and metaphor from the muscle of language, the territory of healing and wholeness.'

Join us for a memorable summer's evening of poetry and prose, and high-grade discussion.

David

A Dada gathering

 Sunday 28th August at 7pm UK time

If you're not already on the mailing list for these monthly live online events please leave your full name and email address at the end of this blog.

A gathering dedicated to the life, work and legacy of Hugo Ball, co-founder, with Tristan Tzara, of the hugely influential Dada movement.

                                                 Hugo Ball (1886-1927) performing at the Cabaret Voltaire

Catherine Schelbert will join us from Switzerland to read, in German and English, from her acclaimed translation of Ball's 1916 novel Flametti, or the Dandyism of the Poor which (as it happens) I reviewed for the Times Lit. Supp. in 2014.  

Hugo Ball wrote this hilarious, provocative, largely overlooked, semi-autobiographical novel in1916, the same year he, Emmy Hennings, Tristan Tzara, and others founded Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Their artist-run nightclub gave birth to Dada as a form of artistic protest against the brutality of the First World War raging in Europe. They spread their ideas in absurd, grotesque performances, sound poetry, and manifestoes. It is from this cultural and political context that the novel Flametti emerged.

“Flametti contains my whole philosophy. Love for those who are down. For the outcasts,
the downtrodden, the tormented.”
                                Hugo Ball in a letter to his sister Maria Hildebrand-Ball, December 1916.

“Schelbert has tackled [. . .] the original with wit and gusto —I can think of no other novel with so many exclamation marks. Every utterance is a mini-manifesto.”
                                David Collard, Times Literary Supplement

“Flametti is a novel that believes in art, and that believes in people. But it’s not at all clear why.”
                                Hannah Alpert-Abrams, Full Stop

“I love your Flametti !!! You are the best reader, writer, translator and all the rest . . . ever. Who had the magnificent idea to have you read it? It could be me. I want the whole book read by you.”
                                Jacqueline Burckhardt by email 

The programme celebrates the latest incarnation of Flametti as a revised edition of her translation (published this month), accompanied by an audiobook/radio play (available online and as a 10" vinyl disc) of Catherine's reading embelished by a soundscape created by Rotterdam-based artists Robert Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma. 

Join Catherine, Robert, Nienke and myself for a programme dedicated to all things Dada. Expect a few surprises and beneficial shocks. 

    

Keep the lights on!

David

A live online Bloomsday gathering

 Sunday 16th June at 7pm UK time

On the 16th June we celebrate Bloomsday (of course) with American authors Lee Klein and P. J. Blumenthal (who will, for one night only, be known as Mr Bloomenthal). They'll be joined by the publisher Jacob Smullyan the poet Simon Barraclough (making a welcome return) and, from Dublin, Joycean Caroline Hett with news of a remarkable discovery.

Lee will be reading from and discussing his new fiction Like it Matters, P.J. will introduce his new novel Winston Hewlett's Impotence and Simon will be reading from his new collection Divine Hours. Full details below.

If you're not already on the guest list and would like to join the audience please leave your full name and email address at the end of this blog.

Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel by Lee Klein

Every Bloomsday, six male writer reader drinker friends gather at a bar to talk about life and literature and to celebrate the idea of the masterpiece more than the masterpiece itself. All are frustrated to the point of desperation. But this Bloomsday will prove different: one of the most celebrated younger writers in the world, with the power to potentially unlock their careers, is expected to join them.

Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel is about ambition, creation, delusion, success, failure, submission, acceptance, rejection, idiocy, anger, idealism, persistence, and the excessive consumption of exceptional beer. It’s also about walking and reading, the gestation of literary and literal offspring, and the joys and sorrows of writing with intent to publish.

Since graduating from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2006, Lee Klein’s stories, essays, reviews, and translations have appeared in Harper’s, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007, and many other sites, journals, and anthologies. He is the author of The Shimmering Go-Between: A Novel (Atticus Books) and Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters from the Eyeshot Outbox (Barrelhouse Books), and translator of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador (New Directions), for which he received a 2015 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award. He lives in the Philadelphia area with his wife and daughter.

Winston Hewlitt's Impotence by P. J. Blumenthal 

Santa Barbara—1970s AD. One morning, Winston Hewlett, mid-30s, idle, wealthy, disaffected, finds he can’t do it anymore. This frightening discovery leads him down a rabbit hole into an unknown world populated with pop-psych groups, mad doctors, roughneck bikers, venues of sexual ambiguity, and the secret agents of a secret society. The frantic quest for his lost potency culminates in a zany chase scene through Disneyland where, pursued by goofy assassins, he stumbles onto the hidden meaning of that place. Finally, this odyssey leads to its goal: a direct confrontation with the truth behind his predicament.

P.J. Blumenthal is an American writer living in Munich, Germany. He is the author of a nonfiction book on feral man, Kaspar Hausers Geschwister (Kaspar Hauser’s Siblings), as well as a German-language blog, “Der Sprachbloggeur.” Three volumes of his poetry have appeared in the USA so far: A Lusty Romance, Poems for Readers and Slow Train to Cincinnati.

You can pre-order both books direct from the publisher here:

https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/like_it_matters/

 https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/winston_hewletts_impotence/

Divine Hours by Simon Barraclough

Simon Barraclough was born in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, to an Irish mother who was a nurse and a Yorkshire father who built gear boxes for tractors and was a successful brass band composer. Eclectic, crucial books in the house were Ulysses, Ian Fleming thrillers and Arnold Silcock's humorous poetry anthology, Verse and Worse.

After studying English at Nottingham University, Barraclough gained an MA in Critical Theory from Sussex and then decided against pursuing a PhD, preferring to write instead. His first collection, Los Alamos Mon Amour, was published by Salt in 2008 and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

He is published widely in poetry magazines, including Poetry Review and The Manhattan Review, and his work has been broadcast on BBC Radio.

Buy Divine Hours direct from the publishers Broken Sleep Books:

https://www.brokensleepbooks.com/product-page/simon-barraclough-divine-hours

Caroline Hett is an independent scholar with a particular interest in the Irish modernist titans James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. She joins us from Dublin with an exclusive report on a noteworthy discovery that will appeal to all Joyceans.

An evening with Jake Goldsmith, Charles Boyle and Kathleen Shields

Sunday 12th May at 7pm

This programme is now available to watch:

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/kV9zTcVuJYid17PaNtVnUtZIbcqr8dt8105oT9KjhzaJT8vBGIcuSmQJkQV6_ow.vP18aea8NVE9b3fP

Passcode: k^0#8!P3

If you're not already on the guest list please leave your full name and email address in the comments box at the end of this blog. I'll be in touch.

This month's free online gathering features the author Jake Goldsmith, publisher Charles Boyle and translator Kathleen Shields, who will be reading from and discussing two new books, neither of which can be easily categorised, both of which deserve your attention!

Jake Goldsmith lives in Suffolk, England. He is an author with cystic fibrosis and a list of other chronic health conditions. His writing mainly focuses on the phenomenology of illness, philosophy, and how illness defines one’s experiences. ​

His second book, published on 1st May 2024, is a collection of essays entitled In Hospital Environments. 

https://www.saggingmeniscus.com/catalog/in_hospital_environments/ This gathering is to celebrate the UK launch.

​

                                                 

In these essays—dealing variously with illness and disability, writing and reading, liberty and apathy, distrust and expertise, Raymond Aron and liberalism, love and grief, and, not least, a beloved cat—Jake Goldsmith demonstrates the radical honesty at the root of philosophy.

            “This is the sound of honest thinking in extremis.”

                                                                                            —Ray Davis, pseudopodium.org

Order In Hospital Environments here @asterism_books and elsewhere https://i.mtr.cool/skidllxcrx

_____________________________________________________________________________

In the second part of the programme we'll be joined by publisher Charles Boyle and (we hope) the translator Kathleen Shields, who will be discussing and reading from Jean Follain's  Paris 1935, published in April by CB editions.

 

This is an intimate, multi-layered portrait of the capital where he has been living for ten years, a celebration of what a city is at a point in time: priests and prostitutes and poets, shop assistants and shoplifters, immigrants and war-wounded invalids, royalists and revolutionaries, women, men and children all work and play and dream in these streets.

“Whether in poetry or prose, Follain is one of the great modern French writers, a secret garden                     waiting to be discovered by the curious. The publication of the first English edition of Paris, so                 nimbly translated by Kathleen Shields, is cause for joy.”

                                                                                                                       – Stephen Romer

Order Paris 1935 direct from the publisher: https://cbeditions.com/Follain.html

Jean Follain (1903–71) was born in Canisy, Normandy. After studying law at Caen, he worked as a judge while pursuing a literary career. He published several poetry collections, including Exister (1947) and Espaces d’instants (1971), as well as prose works about places, Paris (1935), Canisy (1942) and Chef-lieu (1950). Follain knew Éluard and Aragon and was a close friend of Max Jacob. He is often linked with the poets Francis Ponge, Eugène Guillevic and Philippe Jaccottet.

Kathleen Shields taught English at French universities (Paris and Caen) and worked on large bilingual dictionary projects in France and England. For many years she lectured in French at Maynooth University, where she specialised in teaching translation. She is the author of publications in translation studies and literature and of review essays in the Dublin Review of Books. She lives in Dublin.

Charles Boyle needs no introduction!

Join Jake, Charles,  Kathleen and myself on Sunday 12th May at 7pm UK time. 

These are dark times. Keep the lights on.

David

---

An evening with Rose Ruane and Julian Stannard

  Sunday 21st April at 7pm UK time

This gathering has been archived here and free to watch:

 https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/NgY_PvM0tB6pwunWCWxfRpKKJS_k9SOHzQ4u4RlZ-X6lMM9bnVtcMpZ01Y8IEsBr.H0Ff2gM-12JNRD1A

Passcode: 9Z3=k$Y3

This month's free online gathering brings together two wonderful writers: the poet Julian Stannard and the novelist Rose Ruane, who will be reading from, and discussing, their latest books.

If you're not already on the guest list and would like to join in please leave your full name and email address in the comments section at the end of this blog.

Rose Ruane was originally a visual artist working in performance, sculpture, drawing and video. Stories and language were always part of her art practice, but as the written word crept further and further into her art and gradually edged out making and performing, she had to admit that she had become a writer instead.

She undertook the MLitt in Creative Writing at Glasgow University, and subsequently won the Off West End Adopt a Playwright award in 2015. She writes plays, makes podcasts, performs spoken word and occasionally still has a go at drawing and making things just to see if she still can.

She lives in Glasgow with her ever-expanding collections of twentieth century kitsch and other people’s letters, postcards and photographs.

Her debut novel This Is Yesterday was published in 2021. Her latest, Birding, is published  by Little Brown the week after this programme is broadcast! You can pre-order here: https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/birding-rose-ruane/7402172?ean=9781472158000

Julian Stannard has been described as the poet of cabaret. His poems sing and weep in equal measure; a poetry of wretchedness and hilarity, of discombobulation and the bizarre. In his new collection Please Don't Bomb the Ghost of My Brother a dead brother returns on a white horse, a musical stag slips off to New York, the Kray Twins reappear, a summer pudding is carried across a heath, a pair of buttocks escapes their owner, a couple makes love on a rain-soaked stoop, the Mongols catapult concubines over the parapets, a dead friend walks out of his grave like a twenty-first century Lazarus, a blind boy breaks into the Kelvingrove Gallery and makes off with Salvador Dali’s crucifixion, Ezra Pound – half fish, half man – rises to the surface of the Venetian lagoon, and after ten years in the Cicada Lunatic Asylum the narrator finds peace in the Umbrian town of Bastardo.

‘Imagine 'Carry on Rilke', or Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal reworked as an end of the pier pantomime, and you get something of the flavour of Stannard's brilliant new collection. The mysterious poems are darkly funny, and the funny poems are disconcertingly mysterious. I can think of no better companion to have at your side as civilisation's walls collapse and the world spins crazily from its axis.’ —Alan Bilton

Order from Salt here:

https://www.saltpublishing.com/products/please-don-t-bomb-the-ghost-of-my-brother-9781784633066

Join us, and keep the lights burning.

David

An evening with Lara Pawson and Orla Owen

Here's news of next month's online gathering, the third of twelve planned for 2024. 

If you're on the guest list you'll automatically get a zoom link at 6pm on the day. If you're not on the guest list but would like to be, please leave your FULL NAME and EMAIL ADDRESS in the comments section below. And spread the word! It's free to join.

Sunday 24th March at 7pm (UK time)

Join two extraordinary writers for readings and conversation prompted by two very different books.

Lara Pawson

Lara Pawson’s Spent Light is an unclassifable novel-memoir-essay hybrid, examining the hidden lives of objects – toasters, pepper-mills, fridge-freezers, Brazilian gaucho spurs – spinning off wildly into an account of the entire world of resource extraction and forced labour and industrial murder, alongside traditions of craft, reciprocity and affection.

‘Reading Pawson you realise how obedient most writing is, constrained by squeamishness or protocol … Lara Pawson’s writing is brilliant, unnerving and shockingly alive.’
                                                                                                                – Miranda France, Times Literary Supplement

     ‘Spent Light asks us to begin the work of de-enchanting all the crap we gather around ourselves to fend off the abyss – because we’ll never manage that anyway, the book warns, the abyss is already in us. But love is too. There might be no home to be found in objects, but there’s one to be made with other people. I think, in the end, this powerful, startling book is a love letter.’
                                                                                                                 – Jennifer Hodgson

‘I’m flabbergasted by the naked determination on show here, not to say the talent. Page by page, image by image, association by association, Lara Pawson develops a picture of the world that you won’t be offered anywhere else: stark, unremitting, brilliantly formed and written.’
                                                                                                                   – M. John Harrison

‘A shocking book. Lara Pawson’s merciless and exquisite prose adorns everyday objects with the violence of history – the savage comedy by which living creatures have become broken, petrified things. I will never look at a toaster or a timer, a toenail or a squirrel, the same way again.’
                                                                                                                    – Merve Emre

‘Spent Light is, obviously, not comfortable reading, but it is wild, bold writing in league with perfectly clear thinking, and while disturbing it is also, in a satisfyingly dark and absurd way, comic. Shelve it with Lucy Ellmann, Miriam Toews, Jenny Offill; brilliant, disillusioned women in absolute control of glorious prose.’
                                                                                                                    – Sarah Moss, Guardian (full review here)

‘Pawson, who explored Angola’s forgotten massacre in her first book, In the Name of the People (2014), writes with a grotesque beauty. […] Pawson has created something very much her own here. It’s not fiction, it’s not non-fiction, it’s not memoir and it’s not an essay. What it is is a reminder that everything in this world is connected and that stories are everywhere, even in objects we might otherwise overlook.’
                                                                                                                    – Susie Mesure, Spectator

Order direct from CB editions here: https://www.cbeditions.com/Pawson2.html

Orla Owen

Orla Owen's third novel Christ On A Bike was published by the award-winning Bluemoose Books on 25th January 2024.

Cerys receives an unexpected, life-changing inheritance, but there are rules attached. Three simple rules that must be followed...

Routinely unnerving, each chapter becomes progressively more uncomfortable as the source of the inheritance comes into question. The novel goes to some startlingly dark places in its exploration of free will and family ties, and what starts as a deceptively engaging light entertainment about sibling rivalry becomes a wild journey into madness, mayhem and murder.   

It's only been out for a couple of weeks so no press reviews as yet. But take a look at all the five star reviews on Goodreads! https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/200745697 I read it in. asingle sitting and was completely immersed--a brilliant idea, brilliantly realised.

Do join Lara, Orla and myself for an hour of readings and conversation. We look forward to seeing you.

Our next gathering witll be on Sunday 21st April.

Keep the lights on, wherever you are.

David