Dulwich Books Indie Presses Series

Here at Dulwich Books we’re hitting the ground running in 2012. Not only are we holding the Dulwich Books Festival in March, but in February we are going to be trying out something a little different. We’ve lined up events with three progressive independent publishers to make up the inaugural Dulwich Books Indie Presses series; there’ll be poetry, prose, translation, a journal, and meetings with strangers…

We see this series as an opportunity to discover excellent new writing, hear interesting positions on the world of books today and engage in the debate about where independent, free-thinking writing and publishing might be headed in the future. Please come along with questions on these matters or for the authors themselves – we want to get people talking!

Featured Press: Penned in the Margins
Gemma Seltzer: Speak to Strangers
Poetry from Tom Chivers

2nd February 7.00pm, FREE!

To open the Dulwich Books Indie Presses series, we’re delighted to be welcoming London based writer and blogger Gemma Selzter. She will be reading from and discussing her book Speak to Strangers, which began life as a daily, interactive blog project, meeting one hundred strangers in one hundred London days, and recording the encounters in funny, enigmatic hundred-word pieces, treading the line between short story and prose poem.

Tom Chivers is the publisher of Penned in the Margins and an acclaimed poet, with several collections to his name, as well as Stress Fractures, a collection of essays on poetry and City State, an anthology of London Poetry.  His work often draws on the capital, its history, topography and the ways our interactions with the city are shaped by technology and modernity. He will read from How to Build City, and some new work.

Penned in the Margins is an independent publisher ‘committed to publishing exciting, risk-taking poetry and literary works.’ In 2006 they published their first book, an anthology of new poets entitled Generation Txt. More than twenty titles of poetry, short fiction and essays have followed, as well as live events with the likes of Ian Sinclair and David Harsent, described by Londonist as ‘cutting-edge’. 

Featured Press: And Other Stories
Deborah Levy: Swimming Home
Rosalind Harvey: translating Down the Rabbit Hole

9th February 7.00pm, FREE!

For the second event in our Indie Presses series, Deborah Levy will be speaking about her recent novel Swimming Home, where a seemingly ordinary, middle-class villa holiday is disturbed by the arrival of Kitty Finch, ‘a self-proclaimed botanist with green-painted fingernails, walking naked out of the water.’ John Self wrote in the Guardian that Swimming Home ‘has taken worn structures and made something strange and new.’ Swimming Home will also be Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime from the week beginning 27^th February.

Afterwards Rosalind Harvey, translator of Guardian First Book Prize-nominated Down the Rabbit Hole, by Mexican writer Juan Pablo Villalobos, will talk about translating the novel and literary translation in general. We have limited signed copies of Juan Pablo’s book, which has been a surprise best seller at Dulwich Books!

And Other Stories is only one year old, and already their slender list of four titles has received plenty of attention. Publishing carefully-selected foreign and British fiction, with a focus on translation, their books are elegant objects with startlingly original contents. And Other Stories’ philosophy and 11 Commandments emphasise the social side of publishing, with subscribers able to participate in decision making; Jenny Diski, writing in the LRB, thinks they might be just be the future of publishing…

Featured Press: Slightly Foxed
Launch party for Slightly Foxed paperback editions
Ysenda Maxtone Graham and editor Gail Pirkis

23rd February 6.30pm, FREE!

To round out the Dulwich Books Indie Presses series, the well-loved magazine Slightly Foxed will be having a party to celebrate the launch of its first ever paperback editions! 

The paperbacks will be the soft-cover pick of their hardback range, re-publishing classic memoirs which have undeservedly slipped out of print. Ysenda Maxtone Graham will be talking about her hilarious and unusual Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School, a memoir-cum-history of St Philip’s school, of which A. N. Wilson writes, ‘Ysenda has the passionate nosiness of the novelist…she knows how a tiny detail can bring a whole character, a whole scene, to life.’

Slightly Foxed editor Gail Pirkis will also be speaking about editing a journal that, in their own words, is ‘more like a bookish friend’ than a regular periodical. Slightly Foxed publish articles to be enjoyed, mulled-over and shared among friends. ‘Companionable and unstuffy’ might be the best way to describe this elegant cream-coloured journal.  
 

Did you Know that Dulwich Books hosts its own Reading Group / Book Club ? Join in the fun - find out how HERE

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