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 still much the same, ninety years on: it is to the little magazines and small presses we have to look for literary excitement, and I intend to discuss a few of those presses at greater length in the weeks ahead.

As to the changes, one of the saddest is that the then flegling literary publishing house Eliot helped establish at the forefront of Modernism — Faber & Gwyer, later Faber & Faber — have now moved firmly into the middlebrow mainstream.

Secondly, most of the little magazines have disappeared or are becoming even more short-lived. Those which survive are mostly, with a few honourable exceptions, university-supported, such as the Warwick Review, The Reader (Liverpool), Riptide (Exeter, I believe)…

Thirdly, we have, I suspect, reached the point where there are more writers than readers in the country, due in part to the huge growth in Creative Writing courses in the last twenty years. Theoretically, writers are also readers, but it doesn’t always seem to follow.

The last two changes are linked, and together make it harder for writers to get noticed. Gone are the days when publishers and agents trawled the little magazines for potential talent — far easier to cream off the graduates from the nearest M.A. In Novel-Writing course. Hence the increasingly homogenized nature of British publishing.

But against the odds, original talent does surface in the more secluded but deeper waters of independent publishing (i.e. non-Random House/Faber), such as Salt, Honest Publishing, Unthank, Two Ravens and others; these I will discuss individually over the weeks ahead.

I suspect those cultural developments apply as much in America as here, so I want to begin with one British phenomenon in which we can claim uniqueness: our burgeoning stock of both Royals and Royles, and more specifically, of Nicholas Royles — we are blessed with not one but two, in fact, quite distinct although occasionally collaborative. For convenience and clarity, I will refer to them as Manchester Royle and Sussex Royle, as that is where they individually teach.

I will open with Manchester Royle for two reasons, one of them topical: the publication last month of his latest novel, First Novel, to resounding coverage. There is a strong sense of belated justice in this, because Royle has been a formidable but largely unacknowledged presence in British literary circles for decades. As both writer of short stories and also publisher, anthologist, editor, and especially, reviewer in the London listings magazine Time Out, he has almost single-handedly kept the short story form alive and poised for renaissance. (That may sound like hyperbole, but if you don’t go over the top occasionally, it means you are cowering in the trenches.)

So the acclaim awarded his latest (seventh) novel is doubly deserved: as belated recognition and in its own right — it is a brilliant novel.

The revew coverage now available means any synopsis or analysis from me is redundant, except to make the following observations: firstly that there is both a humour and a darker — very dark — side to the novel which have been glossed over in reviews. It has been tagged ‘Post-modern’, but that description has become a hackneyed catch-all catchphrase that doesn’t supply meaningful leverage on this novel. These are not metatextual games.

In fact, with its themes of identity, coincidence and the uncanny, a better tag would be Existentialist; it’s not for nothing that two of the four section epigraphs are from Kierkegaard, and there is an existentialist, almost nihilistic darkness in the narrator’s ‘either/or’ fatalism toward life, his wilful courting of disaster and professional death. It is Royle’s darkest — and strongest — book to date, fully deserving of its praise.

One candidate for a first novel to obsess over, as the narrator does, would be that of the other Nicholas Royle, Sussex Royle. The novel is Quilt, published by the small press Myriad Editions in 2010 to almost total silence. Which was particularly unfair, as this is an ambitious, accomplished and strangely compelling novel; compelling in its strangeness. A strangeness difficult to describe briefly: a man returns to his dead father’s home in order to clear the house and attend the funeral. He decides to stay on after developing an obsession for rays (as in ‘stingrays’) to the extent of installing ever-larger aquaria in the house for a collection of them. Their habits and appearance, disguised in the murk of the mudlevels of the tanks, respond to some deep need in him, both psychologically and linguistically — the novel is also an examination of the murk of language, an attempt to hit a linguistic bedrock.

I found it more than just clever; compelling and as dark in its way as First Novel; as a first novel, it deserved far more reviewing coverage than it got. Surprisingly so, as Royle, who heads the English department of Sussex, is well recognized and respected for his literary-critical works, having written on Theory, Derrida, Shakespeare and, fittingly for a doppelganger, on The Uncanny.

His latest book — Veering, A Theory Of Literature (Edinburgh U.P., 2011) — doesn’t quite, for me, amount to a new theory of literature but does have a very interesting and fruitful approach, related tangentially to Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence idea of the swerve, but more specifically and more generally, in the veering that takes place within the act of writing. It has particularly penetrating analyses of Melville’s Bartleby and on Lawrence generally.

So, we can claim two Nicholas Royles, both with distinctive contributions, but sharing in a certain delight at the regular confusion — a delight which extends to the idea of a rumoured collaboration — a novel or story collection written between them, alternately, I assume, and to be published- if finished — under the author’s name: Nicholas Royle.

I for one can’t wait.