Galley Beggar Press - Digital Classics

Neverland

jordison — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 13:34:28 +0000

Price:

£4.00

This is the ebook edition of a recent - but very classic book.

It took three years to put together Neverland, a novel about "Michael Jackson and his loud mouth friend Uri”. Three years during which, Simon Crump said, Michael Jackson was "with me at home, at work and in my car. He shared my meals and even some of my dreams." Crump finished the book around 9pm BST on 25 June. The real Michael Jackson was dead less than four hours later.

This knowledge gives this haunting, uncanny book even stranger resonance. It's meaning changed before its metaphorical ink had dried. But even without tht spooky coincidence, this would be a short story cycle of extraordinary power.

Briefly, we follow a thoroughly unreliable narrator Lamar (a former member of the Memphis mafia who has now been employed by Michael Jackson) as he loses his wife, drinks drugged coffee and sleeps for years at a time, gets shot and dies – an event that only seems to incapacitate him in so far as he can no longer smoke his favourite brand of mini-cigars. His employer, meanwhile, takes part in the last great gold rush of 1898, tries to buy a unicorn from Ebay, starts fights in shopping malls with Uri Geller, forces Lisa Marie Presley to play with his lego and attacks a horse.

It's funny. So funny. Countless fast one-liners, fine and inventive swearing and several slow-building, repetitive jokes that detonate wonderfully whenever they appear. It's also quite profound. It doesn't make that much sense in a conventional, linear-rational way, but it does all add up...

Seriously.

This digital ebook edition comes with an Afterword by the author and an introduction by the great John Self.

Author:

Simon Crump

Pages:

227

Published:

November 2014

O Caledonia

jordison — Thu, 06 Nov 2014 12:50:30 +0000

Price:

£4.00

Janet lies murdered beneath the castle stairs, oddly attired in her mother's black lace wedding dress, lamented only by her pet jackdaw...

In this, her first novel, Elspeth Barker evokes the unrelenting chill of Calvinism and the Scottish climate; it's a world of isolation and loneliness, where Barker's young protagonist turns to increasingly to literature, nature, and her risque Aunt Lila, who offer brief flashes of respite in an otherwise dank and foreboding life. People, birds and beasts move in a gleeful danse macabre through the lowering landscape in a tale that is as rich and atmospheric as it is witty and mordant. The family motto - Moriens sed Invictus (Dying but Unconquered) - is a fitting epitaph for wild, courageous Janet, and her determination to remain steadfastly herself even as events overtake her.

Praise for Elspeth Barker:

‘Elspeth Barker’s is a wholly original literary voice. … In O Caledonia the reader finds unalloyed joy, and occasional winces, on every page.’

(The Independent)

‘Barker’s love of the classics, her focus on mothers and daughters, and her remarkable evocation of landscape, should mark her out as one of Scotland’s principal writers.’

(The Financial Times)

‘A poetic and passionate description of adolescence. The words sing in their sentences. A world is evoked that has shades of the Bronte sisters and of Poe – the misunderstood and brilliant child with secret and unseen companions, a misfit who develops into a brooding young woman – and so provokes her own fate. O Caledonia sets dreams and longing against Scottish righteousness and judgement, and the resolution is the blade of a skinning knife.’

(The Times)

‘O Caledonia is like a bunch of flowers. Vivid images are handed to the reader one after the other and the colours are often freakish.’

(The Guardian)

‘Beautifully written… a remarkable debut, in a long and fertile tradition of Scottish writing.’

(The Times Literary Supplement)

‘A poetic and blackly comic account of an unhappy childhood in a remote setting, recreated so sensuously it makes you feel the wind on the heath… Exquisite.’

(The Independent on Sunday)

‘Witty, civilised… with ravishing descriptions of nature which manage to be simultaneously rapturous and precise.’

(The New York Review)

‘Animals, Sir Walter Scott’s “alert and wild” Caledonia, and literature are central to Elspeth Barker’s marvellously worked and wielded first novel. It is usually invidious to praise by comparison. But the love of words, the recognition of their power to give a pulse-beat to narrative, made me think of Djuna Barnes as I read, and re-read, for pleasure O Caledonia.’

(The Glasgow Herald)

‘O Caledonia is a novel which, like its heroine, is unique. … Poetry flows as rich as blood through the veins of this narrative.’

(The Scotsman)

‘Janet’s shocking story is one of psychic unraveling, which Barker traces in profoundly seductive prose, extraordinary in its sweeping narrative force and haunted gothic beauty.’

(The List)

‘In the 150 pages of O Caledonia, there is barely a wasted word, and though it, too, participates of genre fiction – in this case, the Gothic – it wears the burden of form lightly enough to take advantage of it by confounding our expectations. Without apparent effort, it achieves what others flail at: It gives us goose-bumps from riding an intellectual roller coaster.’

(The Boston Globe)

Author:

Elspeth Barker

Pages:

100 (approx)

Published:

November 2014

In Youth is Pleasure

jordison — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 21:17:00 +0000

Price:

£4.00

First published in 1945, In Youth Is Pleasure recounts a summer in the life of 15-year-old Orvil Pym, who is holidaying with his father and brothers in a Kentish hotel, with little to do but explore the countryside and surrounding area.

‘I don’t understand what to do, how to live’: so says the 15-year-old Orvil – who, as a boy who glories and suffers in the agonies of adolescence, dissecting the teenage years with an acuity, stands as a clear (marvelously British) ancestor of The Catcher In The Rye’s Holden Caulfield.

A delicate coming-of-age novel, shot through with humour, In Youth Is Pleasure, has long achieved cult status, and earned admirers ranging from Alan Bennett to William Burroughs, Edith Sitwell to John Waters. ‘Maybe there is no better novel in the world that is Denton Welch’s In Youth Is Pleasure,’ wrote Waters. ‘Just holding it my hands… is enough to make illiteracy a worse crime than hunger.’

Denton Welch's three novels - Maiden Voyage, In Youth Is Pleasure, and A Voice Through A Cloud - are the launch titles in Galley Beggar Press's Digital Classics range. Through Galley Beggar Digital Classics we aim to offer a vibrant and eclectic collection of twentieth and twenty-first voices, ranging from the traditional to the experimental, all united by two things - their current unavailability in digital form, and (above all else) their extraordinary quality.

This brand new, first-ever digital edition of In Youth Is Pleasure is accompanied by an introduction by the journalist and writer Steve Finbow - and we hope you enjoy.

Author:

Denton Welch

Pages:

172 (estimated)

Published:

September 2014

A Voice Through a Cloud

jordison — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 21:09:00 +0000

Price:

£4.00

At the age of twenty, the novelist Denton Welch suffered a cycling accident that left him partially paralyzed; the injuries that he sustained were to leave him in almost constant pain for the rest of his life, as well as bestowing upon him the spinal tuberculosis that would kill him at the age of 33. A Voice Trough a Cloud – increasingly regarded as Welch’s masterpiece – is his account of this accident and the period of convalescence soon after. The unsparing chronicle of the world of a hospital patient – riddled with anger, boredom, almost unbearable stabs of pain and sharp flashes of humour – A Voice Trough a Cloud is, as John Updike wrote in The New Yorker, “An incomparable account of shattered flash and refracted spirit.” His third and final novel, and written at a point when Welch could write for no more than a few minutes a day, A Voice Trough a Cloud is nonetheless possibly one of the most complete accounts of health and mortality; as Edmund White says, it is a book of “long slow dying”, “through which all the world’s strangeness can be perceived.”

Denton Welch's three novels - Maiden Voyage, In Youth is Pleasure, and A Voice Through A Cloud - are the launch titles in Galley Beggar Press's Digital Classics range. Through Galley Beggar Digital Classics we aim to offer a vibrant and eclectic collection of twentieth and twenty-first voices, ranging from the traditional to the experimental, all united by two things - their current unavailability in digital form, and (above all else) their extraordinary quality.

This brand new, first-ever digital edition of A Voice Through a Cloud is accompanied by an introduction by the acclaimed novelist and thinker Lars Iyer.

Author:

Denton Welch

Pages:

262 (estimated)

Published:

September 2014

Maiden Voyage

jordison — Mon, 15 Sep 2014 20:53:00 +0000

Price:

£4.00

Maiden Voyage is Denton Welch’s debut novel, a frankly autobiographical account of a short period in his life when – at the age of 16 – he ran away from his English boarding school, before being sent back to Shanghai to live with his businessman father. “Trembling with sex”, is how Alan Bennett wonderfully describes Maiden Voyage; and as well as portraying so acutely the passions and nameless longings of a teenage boy, and the strange quirks and brutalities of public school life, it is also a novel that deals with the agony of childhood bereavement – the suffering of a boy who has only recently lost his mother.

When Maiden Voyage was first published in 1943 it was an overnight sensation, and so graphic in its depiction of adolescence and the schooling system that Welch’s publisher – Herbert Read – was forced to seek legal advice. Seventy years on, there is little to shock the modern reader – but more than enough to earn a new generation of fans and admirers. William Burroughs said, “If ever there was a writer who was neglected, it was Denton. He makes you aware of the magic that is right beneath your eyes.”

Denton Welch's three novels - Maiden Voyage, In Youth is Pleasure, and A Voice Through a Cloud - are the launch titles in Galley Beggar Press's Digital Classics range. Through Galley Beggar Digital Classics we aim to offer a vibrant and eclectic collection of twentieth and twenty-first voices, ranging from the traditional to the experimental, all united by two things - their current unavailability in digital form, and (above all else) their extraordinary quality.

This brand new, first-ever digital edition of Maiden Voyage is accompanied by an introduction by the journalist and writer Suzi Feay.

Author:

Denton Welch

Pages:

289 (estimated)

Published:

September 2014

My Elvis Blackout

jordison — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Price:

£4.00

Join the King of Rock and Roll as he wreaks crazy havoc with the Memphis Mafia, murders huge numbers of groupies, destroys televisions, sabotages Led Zeppelin gigs with great big bags of pigs' blood and somehow also breaks your heart. The best book you have never read - but really must.

This ebook edition comes with a brand new introduction by Jon McGregor and a postscript by the author. It also contains the complete text of one of the best books written in the past twenty years. First published in 2000, but shamefully overlooked ever since, My Elvis Blackout is a work of genius. Of particularly twisted and unsettling genius, but genius all the same. A book so strange, sick and strange again that you'll often wonder what on earth you’re reading. But as you wonder, you'll also marvel.

In these 37 short stories, the King of Rock and Roll - "hero and model to teenagers the world over" - joins a choir in order to torture and murder Christians, labours under the delusion that he's a major rock-star (when really he's just an inmate in an asylum who's afraid of potatoes), and kills both Barbara Cartland and Chris De Burgh. And then he does some bad things too.

Needless to say, it's very funny - but My Elvis Blackout is more than just a laugh riot. This acerbic take on the cult of Elvis' personality tells plenty of uncomfortable truths about our relationship with celebrity, while Simon Crump writes with astonishing force and power about mortality, human cruelty and the horrors that man inflicts upon his fellow man. It's daft. But it's also profound.

And don't think that this is disrespectful to the King, either. Elvis remains a strangely sympathetic (albeit psychotic) character throughout. It's one of the best tributes to his unique genius you can hope to read. Just don't buy it if you're a Chris De Burgh fan…

Praise for my Elvis Blackout

This is one of the most abnormal books of all time, and also one of the best … No home is complete without this magnificent book. -- Dan Rhodes

Like an episode of South Park, where just as you get into the story something goes splat, Crump’s contorted imagination is alarmingly enjoyable. -- The Guardian

If I was born with a name like Simon Crump, I would spend the rest of my life trying to get all that anger and resentment out of me by being very rude about other people. It doesn't bother me in the slightest. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me. Or something like that. No, I wouldn't even give this a passing thought. When you are a famous person, you are there; you are up for grabs for people to have a go at. I know there are comedians who make fun of me. But, you know, I look at my beautiful family, I look at the house I live in and I look at my fans all over the world, and I look at my career and I think, well it's all based on jealousy and envy and really I don't give a toss. -- Chris De Burgh

Author:

Simon Crump

Pages:

160 (estimated)

Published:

December 2012