Thank you, Printed Matter Bookshop for hosting the Records, Rivers and Rats 100 word challenge. Thank you, Andrew, Paula, Zarir, Brian, Howard and Felicity for the readings. The 100 word challenge was won by Howard Coyler.
Tag: Book reviews
Editor left speechless by competition shortlist. Results within…
The shortlist of the 2018 Earlyworks Press short story competition is as follows:
I’ve been having tremendous fun making a meal of the 10-beloved-book round robin on Facebook. I got up to number six, each time giving a bit of a background about how I came to be attached to that particular book at that particular time in my life. It’s really worth unpicking that if you’re a reader, to see if you can uncover where your attitudes and opinions came from.
As Shaun Bythell of Wigtown Bookshop demonstrates in the pages of his diary, people who depend on book sales for a living in the 21st century tend to have a definite Black Books air about them, especially when austerity bites – but Booka doesn’t.
Fasten your seatbelts – we are moving through a patch of turbulence. I had thought it was just me, getting more involved in politics than is good for a person, but when I looked at the lead stories our readers had placed in the final round of our latest competition, and started mentally writing the blurb for the back cover of the anthology, I realised extreme turbulence is on everyone’s mind.
In recent years, we’ve had work from one year’s competitions in the next year’s anthologies but this year, it looked as though it might be possible to go with authors’ wishes to have this year’s winners on this year’s Christmas present lists – It looked possible, and I think we’ve just about done it. The poetry and flash anthology, origami poems and towering stories, if ordered this week, will be with you by 10th December. If you’re in the UK, hooray! You can send them out as Christmas pressies. For those on the other side of the globe, we’ll send yours out first and cross our fingers!
I’m so pleased that for the rest of my life there’s an extra element to the experience of listening to bird song. I can work on how the notes of a thrush might sound like the smell of cold tea with no sugar….
‘If on a winter’s night a traveller’ what?!
Italo Calvino’s epic adventure in perceptions of reading and writing was devoured by book lovers of every variety when it first came out. At least, the first few pages were. If it has a fault (I think it has two actually) it is that the first few pages are so utterly, delightfully entertaining to booklovers it’s worth buying just for those…
