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The Glue Factory February newsletter
This is to let you know about forthcoming events and/or publications involving (for the most part) writers and creative practitioners who have contributed to our online gatherings over the last few years and who will therefore be familiar to many of you. Please support them!
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Thirty-one years of Piece of Paper Press: artists’ books, artworks and ephemera, 1994–2025
This retrospective opened last week and running until 23rd March 2025 at Matt’s Gallery in Nine Elms:
Piece of Paper Press is an ongoing artists’ book series founded by author Tony White in 1994. The project was designed to address the economic conditions of the period, but has continued unchanged: a lo-fi, sustainable format used to commission, publish and distribute limited editions of new writings and visual works by artists and writers. Each book is made from a single A4 sheet, printed both sides then folded, stapled and trimmed by hand. Piece of Paper Press editions are always given away free.
The forty-sixth title from Piece of Paper Press, Tones by Andrew Mottershead, will be released during the exhibition run, on 7th March. Details / directions: Matt's Gallery Gallery hours Wednesday to Sunday, 12pm–6pm
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Will Eaves and Beverley Bie Brahic will give a joint reading at the Broadway Bookshop, 6 Broadway Market, London E8 4QJ on Thursday 13th February at 7pm. The evening will feature two recently-published poetry collections: Will’s Invasion of the Polyhedrons and Barbara’s The Apple Thieves. It’s free, but spaces are limited and you’ll need to book here.
Buy Will’s book from the publisher CB editions. Buy Beverley’s book from Carcanet
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‘Day. Another. London city and world. There before me as you were. I still see you as I saw you and long to be you, as I was you, all the way over again.’
Eimear McBride’s new novel The City Changes Its Face is launched by Faber on Thursday 13th February. It’s a sequel of sort to The Lesser Bohemians, and a wonderful combination of light and deep.
There’s a big launch event from 7:45pm that evening in the South Bank Centre, when the author will be in conversation with Miranda Sawyer. Tickets start at £17 (which doesn’t include a copy of the book - oof!) Further details here.
On the following day - Friday 14th February - there’s another launch event for at the Assembly Rooms in Norwich. Elmer McBride will be in conversation with the publishers and bookseller Henry Layte. Tickets are just £5 and available here.
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Saltburn, the new novel by Drew Gummerson is published on Wednesday 26th February by Haywood Books (with a dazzling cover which puts me in mind of Tunnocks Teacakes).
Saltburn is a town on the English coast with sweeping poverty and nuclear fallout, where young lovers, radioactive and lusty, fall in love, and sea creatures work at the local penny arcade. In a series of interconnected short stories a young orphan is taken in by an alchemist, and falls in love with a mermaid. The son of a glove manufacturer is sent to Paris on business, where he falls for a deep-sea diver. One schoolboy bites another, gains psychic abilities and realises they will one day be in love. A rock salesman exposes a cover-up by big business and frees kidnapped women.
More details on the publisher’s website here.
A mention for Drew’s earlier novel Seven Nights at the Flamingo Hotel (Bearded Badger Publishing, 2020) which is very funny indeed and extremely rude. How’s this for a pitch?
‘You could have been someone, you could have been a contender, yet instead you ended up here, a dishwasher at the Flamingo Hotel. From the death of your mother, to homelessness, to insanity, and back again, to an encounter with an American serial killer, a lover affair with a performance artist, to the loss of your foreskin, to living in a shed, and certain bum operations, you have only ever wanted one thing. To find someone worse off than yourself.
And now's your chance.
You've got seven nights.
At the Flamingo Hotel.’
You can find copies online. Recommended.
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Kevin Boniface, author of Sports and Social and a stalwart member of Carthorse Orchestra, is hosting a free online two-hour programme on Tuesday 25th February. Free, I repeat. You have to book, mind: Click here for tickets
Kevin Boniface has also reportedly recorded a podcast with his publisher Kevin Duffy of Bluemmoose Books, but details are proving elusive. More on that next time…
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We’re used to being told (usually by Will Self) that the novel is dead, dying, or endangered. Yet the form remains more popular than ever with readers. In The Future of the Novel, published by Melville House, author Simon Okotie presents a bold future for long-form fiction, and suggests its evolution is far from over. On Wednesday 26th February, Lara Pawson will be in conversation with Simon to mark the launch of his brilliant new book The Future of the Novel (Melville House). You can order a copy here. The venue is the lovely Liberia bookshop (65 Hanbury Street, London E1) but at the time of writing there are no tickets left. Returns may be available here.
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A new novel by Kevin Davey will always be a literary highlight of any year. Toothpull of St Dunstan is the third part of a loose-knit trilogy set in Kent that follows Playing Possum and Radio Joan, and the central character is an 800-year-old Canterbury dentist. I read a draft some months ago and was stunned by the range, depth and originality of this strange, radically adventurous fiction.
Nobody else today is writing anything like this. There will be an online gathering to launch the book and plans are in hand for real-life events in appropriate venues. The publisher is Aaargh! Books (but there’s nothing on their website about this yet).
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Penny McCarthy is a distinguished Shakespeare scholar who made several appearances on Carthorse Orchestra (and nobody who saw it will forget her brilliant exposition of the cryptic dedication to the first edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (right) - the ’hour’glass’ poem which, reconfigured and decoded, was an absolutely unexpected revelation. Her recent book Antedating Shakespeare’s Plays (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, September 2024) offers a challenge to the established chronology of Shakespeare’s plays. The consensus view is that he served an apprenticeship collaborating on plays in the 1580s, wrote two great poems in the early 90s, three plays a year from the mid-90s, some problem plays around the turn of the century, then his greatest tragedies, and finally some “romances” late in his career. Concentrating on his poems and six of his plays, the study ascribes parallels in others’ literary works to their authors’ imitation or parodying of Shakespeare, not vice versa. The conclusion is that Shakespeare’s works must be radically antedated. More on this here
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The novelist Jeremy Cooper, winner of the Fitzcarraldo novel prize, is also an antiques expert, art historian and collector who lives in rural Somerset. (You may know him from the telly - he appeared on The Antiques Roadshow for many years as their resident art expert.) An exhibition of artworks he’s assembled over the last fifty years opened on 25th January. Few of theses have ever been shown before and most of them will afterwards be donated as gifts to public institutions. It’s at the East Quay Gallery in the village of Watchet, Somerset - a lovely part of the world. Details here.
Jeremy’s most recent book is Brian, an absolutely delightful and touching novel about a solitary film buff, which I reviewed for the TLS here. To date he has published six novels in all, three of them with Fitzcarraldo, and they’re all warmly recommended.
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Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat are currently creating their first joint choreographic work exclusively for Ballett Basel in Switzerland. ’Go With Your Heart’ features costumes by Laura Hopkins and opens on Friday 21st March at the Theatre Basel in Switzerland, From the theatre website:
Etchells is best known as the artistic director of the English performance group Forced Entertainment, one of the UK's most respected theatre groups. His artistic fascination is with the rules and systems in our culture, which he examines in a playful and captivating way. Horvat, who most recently presented her work in the Croatian pavilion at the 60th Venice Art Biennale with the overarching theme «Foreigners Everywhere», explores in her work the spatial and social relationships between bodies, objects and the created environment. A dynamic, contemporary work in the interstices of art, choreography and artistic action. More on that here.
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Lucy Caldwell’s widely-acclaimed novel These Days will be published in the United States on Tuesday 8th April with Sarah Jessica Parker’s imprint at Zando, SJPLit. (And even I’ve heard of Sarah Jessica Parker and In the Sexy City, although I confess I’ve never seen it.)
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A welcome email from the wonderful Dublin soprano Elizabeth Hilliard to alert me to a forthcoming biography, by her cousin Lin Rose Clark, of a remarkable ancestor. Robert Martin Hilliard (7 April 1904 – 22 February 1937) was an Olympic boxer, Irish republican, Church of Ireland minister and communist. He was killed in the Spanish Civil War fighting in the International Brigades. What a life!
Swift Blaze of Fire is subtitled Olympian, Cleric, Brigadista: the Enigma of Robert Hilliard and is published by Liliput in April.
From the publisher’s website: Celebrated in song by Christy Moore and affectionately recalled in many memoirs, Robert "Bob" Hilliard, the author's grandfather, is one of Ireland's best-known International Brigadistas. His short life blazed with a rare intensity; his death in Spain left a dark shadow hanging over his family. This book unravels Hilliard’s enigmas to bring us an absorbing character and a fresh understanding of the times that shaped him.
Hilliard was radicalised at school by the Irish revolution. Variously a journalist, an Olympic boxer for Ireland and a Church of Ireland priest, he became a communist and anti-fascist in London, fought with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War and died of wounds sustained at the Battle of Jarama. Eloquent and colourful, he inspires puzzlement as well as admiration. Why was his life so full of contradictions? One question haunted the author's mother: how could he leave his children?
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Eimear McBride again! Not just an excuse to share my all-time favourite author photo but also to let you know that Faber have just announced publication of ‘a limited-run Collectors’ Edition of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, signed by the author on a bespoke design signature page.’
There’s more:
‘The edition is printed on premium wood-free paper and bound in burgundy fine linen cloth with yellow and white foil detail, gold head and tail bands and yellow ribbon marker. Each purchase will be individually wrapped in brown paper and sealed with a Faber Members sticker.’
'A book in brown paper from Faber and Faber’? IYKYK. Details here.
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First Graft is a podcast hosted by the writer Heidi James (left) launched in December 2024 and new to me, and my thanks to Orla Owen for flagging it up. In this first episode (from December 2024), Heidi and her guest Rose Ruane talk about ‘writing, visual art, trauma and noticing.’ Rose is an artist & writer who lives in Glasgow with her ever- expanding collection of 20th Century kitsch.
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Finally, and as mentioned in the previous newsletter, I’m delighted to be working with author Jake Goldsmith and others to re-launch the Barbellion Prize. This, you’ll know, is 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, but will be back in September this year.
We’ve created a ‘transition committee’ to oversee the relaunch, which will be looking at terms and conditions of submission, and fundraising, and the recruitment of a part-time administrator, as well as suitable sponsors and/or partners. We’ll share more news in the March newsletter. Meanwhile here’s the current Barbellion website.
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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.
