Blogs

A collection of short stories that won the Man Booker International Prize, which is a surprise, because nobody publishes short stories now, but if you’re Alice Munro you can pretty well do what you like. A good story—whether it’s short or long—makes you think of other stories, perhaps something that happened in childhood. Bad stories are easy to spot. There are no bumps or mounds among the words, no mountains of childhood and you might just as...

Tomorrow is ABCtales’ get-together in the North – we’ll be meeting at The Black Swan in York from 18:30 – and it promises to be an incredible time. If you haven’t planned your Saturday yet, book a ticket, borrow a car, get your nan to give you a lift: do what you need to do to be there! Among the readers will be VeraClark, whose ‘Tissue Atlas’ is our Story of the Week. This piece is a remarkable biography told in the style of a human atlas. The...

Watching or reading about the Holocaust, or the horrors of the Japanese prison camps, always makes me hungry. I don’t know if that makes me empathetic or a greedy bastard. I suspect in another life I’d have made quite a good Nazi. I’ve read about Terezin before. It was a half-way house to the hell of Auschwitz and other extermination camps. In buildings that should have held a maximum of 6000 the camp held, in 1942, 60 000 and they kept coming,...

ABCtales is hosting a get-together in the north this weekend! On Saturday , 1st February 2014, we will be meeting at The Black Swan in York (23 Peasholme Green, YO1 7PR). There will be readings beginning at 18:30 and on until 20:30, but the conversation and catch-up will no doubt go on for much longer. This is the perfect opportunity to hear a live performance from a very talented roster of ABC's authors. But on top of our usual reading model we...

Howl is a poem, perhaps the poem, that helped to bring together a loose group of writers and poets that we refer to as the Beat Generation. Certainly, Epstein and Freiman have put lots of work into establishing those credentials. The film jumps back and forth between Alan Ginsberg’s (played by James Franco) inaugural reading of the poem at the Six Gallery Reading in 1955, the 1957 obscenity trial of Lawrence Ferlingetti (Andrew Rogers) and his...

The Boy at the Gate is Danny Ellis aged eight. He’s waiting for his Ma at one of the three gates leading into and out of Artane Industrial School. It’s run by the Christian Brothers and has five dormitories with 175 bed, a cinema and a 325-foot long hall, a concert hall, various rooms, kitchens, administrative block. When Ellis talks about the Christian Brothers ‘caring’ for children he marks out the word care by quotation marks. ‘Christian’ and...

Let’s start with the important stuff. In the Acknowledgment’s page Kevin acknowledges all his friends on a writers’ website AbcTales.com. Yeh, I know, never heard of it either. If I had heard of it I might have read some of Kevin’s stuff and in particular the narrator Tom meeting his sister, Karen, her husband Rod (Rod’s a rod) and their daughter Natalie to celebrate his mum’s eightieth-odd birthday, and been wildly impressed. Tom is a writer. I...

Our story of the week comes from In The Day , the utterly incredible novel from Kevin Marman, a.k.a Stan, which is now available from Longmarsh Press and soon from Waterstones and independent booksellers around the UK. If you’re interested, find out how to get a copy and read a full review of the book, here: http://www.abctales.com/blog/luke-neima/stan%E2%80%99s-novel-%E2%80%93-d... . But if you’re not convinced, have a read of ‘Thursday’, our...

I’ve been meaning to write about In the Day for a while now. When Stan (Kevin Marman) first sent me his novel in December, I thought I’d read it quickly over the holidays and put something up by the end of the month. But I wasn’t quite prepared for what the book actually is. And what it is, is excellent. In every respect. And like any other excellent novel In the Day is one you have to read slowly – because there’s so much you need to pause and...

It’s been an exciting week here at ABC – we’ve had two big announcements, our Picks of the Year from 2013 (which you can read more about here: http://www.abctales.com/blog/luke-neima/picks-year-2013 ) as well as the results from our Winter competition (which you can find, along with honourable mentions, here: http://www.abctales.com/blog/luke-neima/results-abc%E2%80%99s-winter-competition ). All of which makes for some excellent reading (for...