News and Features

It’s one of those weeks when I’m between reads – or at least in a reading slump. I do have a book on the go, Philip Roth’s My Life As a Man , a mid-career book structured in a way that’s somewhere between ingenious and lazy: two long short stories are followed by a novella – which begins with the narrator explaining that he wrote the two preceding stories. While the stories held my attention the novella is just a touch too self-indulgent and...

This Wednesday we had one of the liveliest ABCtales get-togethers I’ve ever been to. From prison-narratives to eerie accordion-accompanied poetry to a stunning set from a handful of My Baby Shot Me Down authors it was ABCtales at its best, and I’d like to thank everyone who came out and took part. One of the things that I was most impressed by was the sheer variety of the work read. From an utterly impressive stream-of-conscious narrative by...

Our next ABCtales get-together is almost upon us - we'll be meeting next Wednesday , June 18th upstairs at the Wheatsheaf pub in Bloomsbury (25 Rathbone Place, W1T 1JB) from 7pm . The writers we'll be featuring this month include Grover, John Shade, RJF, MJG and Peter Kennedy - along with several of the authors included in My Baby Shot Me Down - the recent all-women collection of ABCtales writers out now with Blinding Books. We'll take a moment...

This week we spoke with Cristina Henriquez, a brilliant American novelist who’s been called one of "Fiction's New Luminaries" by the Virginia Quarterly Review. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Glimmer Train, and Ploughshares, and her second novel (her first in the UK), The Book of Unknown Americans , publishes this Thursday, the 5th of June, with Canongate. It’s a deeply moving tale of one family’s determination to cope...