Hello!

 

Please forgive an extra email this month.

 

Please also forgive also a hard cold blast of capitalism. We’ve got stuff to sell and to advertise. Hopefully you'll like it.

 

First, from now until Christmas*, we’re going to be selling our much-loved Ghost books for £1.50 in our store. 

 

We’ve got Lost Journey by AL Barker:

 

 

We’ve got The Eyes by Edith Wharton:

 

 

And we’ve got The Body Snatchers by Robert Louis Stevenson:

 

 

£1.50 each. £5.50 for three. £55 for thirty. 

 

We’ve no longer got Honeysuckle Cottage. It went and sold out. But if we sell enough of everything else, we’ll bring those back next year too.

 

Second, Playthings. It marches on. I’ll save the review-bragging for next month (Although please look out for a review in the Guardian this weekend.)**

 

For now, we have a very special offer.  During our recent returns nightmare, we were sent a box of (second, third and fourth edition) black-flap Girl Is A Half-Formed Things. We’ve got about 50 - and we’ll send them off to about the first 50 people to buy a signed First Edition of Playthings before Sunday. Run to it! That’s two stone-cold classics for the price of one. Maybe capitalism isn’t all bad after all ***

 

 

 

Third, while talking of Playthings, please come and see Alex in action at Waterstones New Street in Birmingham this Saturday. Elly and I will be there too. We'll be talking art, Schreber, everything... Alex will read too, which is something you have to see. 

 

Fourth, there’s not much time left to enter our Short Story competition . We’ve had over 300 entries and from some very fine writers. So if you win, you’ve really won. You’ve written one hell of a story. (The prize is a handy £500  - or an even handier 12-months of editorial support, which we are especially keen on as it seems like a great and useful way that we can support and get to know writers...) 

 

Okay, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading. I’ll be back in a couple of weeks with more news, a new Single, and updates on Jeff Bezos. (Apparently as I write this, he’s at home feeding feeding ever larger animals to his pet pythons. He started on cute little mice, but now he’s on sheep and I just don’t know where he’s going to stop and I don’t know what’s happening inside his head.) 

 

Sam

 

*That's a hint. Christmas. These are good presents. You get the drift. And I'm sorry. I feel a little sick too. But heck. We've got people we need to pay. 

 

**Okay. One quick bit of review bragging. Here’s a series of tweets from Vic James, who just read it.

 

(1) "Playthings is amazing. Properly amazing. Wow." 

 

(2) "You must put it in for every award it is eligible for." 

 

(3) "It's like The Testament of Gideon Mack in its exploration of psychiatric disaster. But BETTER." 

 

(4) "Are you eligible to submit for the Booker? I'm not kidding, this is the best thing I've read all year." 

 

(5) "It is the kind of thing that completely restores my faith in the literary arts." 

 

(6) "And a bloody GREAT READ, too." 

 

(7) "A disturbing and humane book, and immaculately realised. Bravo to you all at GB & congrats to Pheby!" 

 

*** Capitalism is bad. It’s awful. It’s mean. 

 

Hey! Thanks for reading all the way down here. One more treat. Here's a book we're working on at the moment. It is called The Forbidden Line. It is immense, incredible, unique. You saw it first right here: