Newsletter January 2025

The Glue Factory January newsletter

So.

I hope the new year is shaping up well for you.  Or as well as can be expected.

This first 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. 

On Thursday 13th February Will Eaves and Beverley Bie Brahic will give a joint reading at the Broadway Bookshop, 6 Broadway Market, London E8 4QJ. 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. 

More poetry! Our friend Julian Standard has a new ‘Selected Poems’ out this month from Salt. A wonderful collection spanning 25 years. You can order direct from the publishers here.

Kevin Boniface, author of Sports and Social and a  stalwart member of the Carthorse Orchestra community, is hosting a free online two-hour programme on 25th February. You have to book, mind:  Click here for tickets 

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 the 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 Liberia bookshop (65 Hanbury Street, London E1) and if it hasn’t already sold out (which it probably has) free tickets can be booked here. 

The City Changes its Face is the latest novel by Eimaer McBride, to be published by Faber on 13th February. It’s a sequel (of sorts) to The Lesser Bohemians and every bit as good - both light and deep, a perfect balance.

From the Faber website:

‘One of the finest writers at work today.’ ANNE ENRIGHT

‘McBride is a cartographer of the secret self, guiding us towards hidden treasure.’ CLAIRE KILROY

‘A writer for whom language is an end not a means, a beginning not an end.’ JEANETTE WINTERSON

‘A writer of remarkable power and originality.’ TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

(Fun fact: the last quote is from my TLS review of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing but for some reason I don’t get a name check. Am I bitter about this? Meh.)

 

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, and if Kevin Davey has an equal it’s William Golding. There will be an online gathering to launch the book and plans are in hand for a real-life event in an appropriate venue. The publisher is Aaargh! Books (but there’s nothing on their website about this).

Tim Etchells and Vlatka Horvat are creating a new ballet ‘Go With Your Heart,’ with costumes by Laura Hopkins, opening on 21st March at the Theatre Basel in Switzerland, From the theatre website:

Stage icon Tim Etchells and artist Vlatka Horvat are creating their first joint choreographic work exclusively for Ballett Basel. Etchells is best known as the artistic director of the English performance group Forced Entertainment, one of the UK's most respected theater 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. 

Susanna Crossman will be in London later this year to launch The Orange Notebooks - ‘a dazzling novel about a mother's journey through grief to radical hope.’ This will be in the Trafalgar Square branch of Waterstones on Thursday 22nd May, when the author will be in conversation with Catherine Taylor. Free tickets will be available from the Waterstones website later this year.

Wendy Erskine’s keenly-anticipated first novel The Benefactors will be  published by Sceptre on 19th June. This follows her two acclaimed collections of short stories Sweet Home and Dance Moves which (in my view) have done for Belfast what Joyce did for Dublin in Dubliners. Described as ‘a daring, polyphonic presentation of modern-day Northern Ireland.’  What a writer - she has all the gifts.

In such company I feel (as Auden would put it) ‘like a shabby curate in a room full of viscounts’ but as it happens I, too, have a new book out in June. 

A Crumpled Swan  is a collection of fifty essays (all by me) prompted by ‘In the dream of the cold restaurant,’ a single short poem by Abigail Parry. There will be launch events in Dublin (at Hodges Figgis on Thursday 12th June), in London (date and venue to be confirmed), and online (date to be confirmed). Extracts will appear in Exacting Clam, The London Magazine and elsewhere. 

Details of the book are on my publisher’s website here.

Finally - 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. More on this vital prize in the next newsletter, which will explain how you can be part of it. Meanwhile here’s the website.

That’s all for now. If you’re still reading this, thank you. These are dark times. Let’s keep the lights on.

David

PS Authors and indie publishers - do 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. Do let me know if you’d rather not be on the mailing list and I’ll happily stop badgering you. D.