Going incognito is easier than you think. First you have to cut your hair, which is probably the hardest part. You’ve always had long hair — at least since you were nine or ten, anyway. Sylvia always wanted to cut it short because she said she thought you looked so cute with short hair, or…

Of all the things people thought would bring the world to an end — incurable diseases, unstoppable weapons, total environmental catastrophe — no one imagined that our sheer will to keep on living was what would do us in. The immortality gene had been discovered. At least that’s what the buzz was for a while,…

In my last post of my month’s residency, after thanking Steve Himmer for his hospitality, I want to look northward, backward, and forward. Bradford is a town in northern England — correction: it’s in Yorkshire; England is irrelevant. A town whose wealth was made in the wool trade, but which added also to our cultural…

My very first story was published in The Literary Review in 1989, accepted by Auberon Waugh, and I still have his acceptance letter, handwritten with fountain pen. Waugh had been appointed editor by its new owner, ‘flamboyant’ (i.e. rich) Naim Atallah, who had previously bought the publishing house Quartet in 1976, four years after its…

Comma Press is a Manchester-based press founded, and funded, expressly to publish short fiction, which it does in the form of both full collections and series of anthologies. The series include one of ‘City’ anthologies — each devoted to a single British, European or Eastern city — and one of spectra of new and established…

The press I want to discuss next is the newest so far, just a few months old, in fact: Negative Press. The name does not denote English diffidence — its founder, Roelof Bakker, is Dutch, although resident in London since the Eighties. It derives from the fact that Bakker is a photographer, with a reel…

I want to include in my independent-press roundup a small, one-man press — Welbeck Press — one-man in both senses, being run by Stephen Benatar to publish his own books. ‘Vanity publishing’, you will immediately cry, and you’d be right. But it is more complicated and more interesting than that. It would be more accurate…

I live a few miles from Twickenham, ‘Home of English Rugby’, now ‘Home of Honest Publishing’. I was visiting a small independent bookshop there a couple of years ago, checking on any possible sales of Vault. The assistant bookseller, whom I knew from his previous job in Staines, pointed me to a small display by…

Unthank Books is still a relatively new publisher, but has already established a strong identity, not least by its beautifully designed covers. It’s a short list so far but uniformly excellent in its choice of authors as much as its covers. And it is growing apace: this week sees the publication of its latest title,…

I have taken the title from T.S. Eliot, whose collected letters I have been reading avidly. Eliot in the Twenties wrote a column under that heading for The Dial, until it became too much with his other commitments. It’s both reassuring and depressing to find that, apart from a few changes, the situation here is…

I confess I felt both flattered and honoured, not to say surprised, at Steve Himmer’s invitation to be a writer-in-residence here; even more so on finding that Lee Rourke is among my predecessors. I was then even more flattered by the eulogistic introduction Steve posted up earlier this week. It is certainly very encouraging to…

This week I’ll wrap up my series on socially-conscious fiction. To that end, here’s a meditation on Ann Pancake and social justice from a writer, Ellen Meeropol, who is interested in work that is explicitly socially conscious. “This is the kind of fiction I try to write,” she says. In Ellen’s Words: My favorite novels…