A Few Good Books

Following a brief interruption, we’re pleased to reopen our submission guidelines. As part of our ongoing publishing programme we have a genuine opportunity for a few good books. Our new guidelines reflect this and we’re hoping for a few standout book proposals.

As way of guidance, we’re looking for titles to fit in with our ongoing programme, not to reinvent it. This means we will consider fiction – novels, novellas and short story collections – as well as non-fiction titles – memoir, biography, culture and sport. Remember all our books are based around stories.

This may seem like lame advice, but we recommend that you give good thought to the proposal you are sending to us; this is a good opportunity to introduce yourself or your idea and it will help you stand out from the crowd. We regularly receive indiscriminate book proposals that generally fall far outside our remit, are ill conceived or unrealistic in their ambition. When making your proposal ask yourself: is this book really suitable for Route, have you thought it all the way through and are you being realistic about what it can achieve?

Route publishes only a relatively small number of books per year, our distinction is that we work closely on all our books. There is a very human aspect to what we do, and this shouldn’t be underestimated when making your proposal. Books rarely happen over night or at arms length. We will be looking for proposals that promise a positive experience for all involved, something we can collaborate on fully.

If we haven’t put you off yet and you’ve got a book for Route, then send us a letter outlining your proposal, together with a synopsis and a sample of the manuscript where appropriate. Please post to: A Few Good Books, Route, PO Box 167, Pontefract, WF8 4WW, UK.

Submissions open from 1 March to 31 August 2010

No email submissions. No poetry.

Click here for our full submission guidelines.

Rainbows Seen From the Air… By Sarah Butler

Sarah Butler – Rainbows Seen From The Air Are Complete Circles. Short Story. When an older man steals a cinnabar button off a vulnerable young singer’s coat, a strange, ephemeral alliance is formed. She follows him down Kentish Town Road to a house filled with colour and the possibility of change. From Wonderwall. Read by the author.

Rainbows Seen From the Air Are Complete Cirlces by routeaudio

Click here for more on Wonderwall
Click here for more on Sarah Butler

Michael Nath Interview – La Rochelle

Michael Nath answers questions on his novel La Rochelle. Here is the start, click here to see the full interview.

Q: Where did the idea for La Rochelle come from and what is the launch point for such a book?

A: The idea came from a dream my brother Paul told me, in the autumn of 2003. His girlfriend had been kidnapped by a criminal called ‘Whitby’. I agreed to do a swap for her, so we took a taxi down from London to the countryside, where Whitby’d taken her. In the taxi, the driver turned to us and said, ‘Can’t you see, the whole of London’s going down!’ Behind us, there were fires in the sky, falling cranes, etc. This was the starting point, the disappearance of a woman, and the name Whitby, which really stuck in the mind.

Q. It is quite an unconventional read. What is it you were trying to achieve with the book?

I was trying to write a novel that wasn’t too much like a ‘novel’. It had to have the qualities of life instead, such as thickness, abundance, presence, a degree of untidiness. I was after something baroque and dishevelled, with a coat of varnish. I also wished to write something that will last, so that readers may feel inclined to read it again (and even again).  Furthermore, I felt it was necessary to bring privacy back into fiction. Can anyone tell what the narrator’s problem really is in La Rochelle? This isn’t an issues book, and it isn’t journalism in disguise.

I was also trying to make people laugh, and worry.

Q. Could you elaborate on ‘This isn’t an issues book, and it isn’t journalism in disguise’?

A. I mean it isn’t a book in which the narrator’s problems have been formulated in advance, and in a manner that robs them of their particularity to him. They are problems that are being experienced through a sort of fog, rather than seen clearly, as something that ‘everyone’ knows all about these days. The narrator can’t see around his own corner, whereas journalism typically supposes it can.

Click here to see the interview in full, here for more details on La Rochelle.

Re: Introducing the Graphomaniacs

Route is ten years old today. The first Route publication, Introducing the Graphomaniacs (Route 1), a newspaper, was issued on 1 February 2000, conceived and compiled during the Millennium euphoria.

We’d taken the title from the Milan Kundera essay ‘Sixty-three Words’, in which he was asked to write his own mini-dictionary. One of these words was Graphomania – ‘Not a mania to write letters, diaries, or family chronicles, but a mania to write books (to have a public of unknown readers).’ We were about to launch an ambitious programme of publishing and live events to get behind a generation of writers we’d discovered from our submissions and a two year writing programme called The Opening Line. The cities were bustling, there was a genuine buzz of creative energy and we wanted to celebrate what we saw as a new northern dynamic: post-industrial and post-migrational. It was an exciting time. The attitude in my editorial in the first issue will be recognisable to anyone just setting out on their own literary ventures, and it’s naivety ditto for those who’ve been at it for ten years or more. It ran:

‘If there is one thing that is proven about this part of the world, is its track record of nurturing generations of writers. Maybe it’s because life up here can be perfectly strange, some say it’s in the water. Perhaps it’s the quality of life. Whatever, anyone who stands back, takes a sharp intake of breath and has a look around in these parts, can find themselves with a whole lifetime’s worth of writing material. There is never a time more unfathomable and strange than the present and currently there is a big bundle of writers itching to break loose and tell us about it. We know, we’ve seen them…

…The majority of books flying off the shelves are published a couple of hundred miles south of here. Not very far geographically, but perhaps a bit further culturally. The waters are very different that’s for sure, it recycles a lot quicker to put it kindly. Some of us could fly a few thousand miles east and find more in common. But, for one of the aforementioned writers in the bundle to get you to have a look at their point of view, they first have to convince someone down there that it’s a good idea. Surely not. Not anymore, anyway.’

In that first issue, Daithidh MacEochaidh wrote about posh London eateries serving up tripe, Adrian Wilson wrote about K-Tel pop music compilations, Robert Endeacott about the Millennial fountain in Leeds, Nick Toczek wrote an article on the development of British performance poetry, Clayton Devanny wrote about Dr John, and we had stories from Julie Mellor, Val Cale and a poem from Michelle Scally Clarke. The whole issue was illustrated by photos from Tristan Campbell.

We’d put together a series of six live shows at The Wardrobe in Leeds, and calculated that for the normal price of glossy fliers and posters, we could produce a newspaper instead. The idea was to use content as promotional material. We pulled the thing together, laid it out across the dining room table, then went off on an inspirational trip to New York, where we drank a lot of whisky and performed to an intellectual literary set at a church in the middle of Manhattan. While we were away a printer in Barnsley rattled off 5000 copies of Route 1, which we promptly scattered across bars, clubs, theatres, venues and anywhere we thought we might find some readers. The first gig, advertised on the back of the paper, was John Cooper Clarke on 20 February, supported by our own cast of performers: Phil Hancock, Andy Campbell, Pedro González and The Budists. It turned out to be a packed house. We’d brought along an old friend of Clarke’s as a surprise for him. They got stuck in to the Vodka Martini’s at the bar and the great poet forgot himself a little and performed for an hour longer than we’d booked him for. The bar was littered with promotional matchboxes we’d produced that carried the slogan ‘Unsettle the Complacent Mind’. Route was up and running.

Ian Daley

Stories behind the Stories

A series of small interviews with the authors featured in The Route Book at Bedtime has been posted on route-online.com The Route Book at Bedtime (Route 22) is a book of 12 stories that aims to capture those moments of deep emotional significance which return to us in our dreams. But what is the story behind the stories? In this feature, 10 of the authors talk about the inspiration behind the work. Here are a few samples.

M Y Alam on Smokes and Dust
I’d completed a draft while my father was in hospital for nearly three months. He recovered for a couple of months before relapsing. It’s not that I felt obliged to write anything about or even for him, but the love of the word was something he cultivated in me from an early age, sometimes without even knowing it. Unlike me, the writing was a much deeper part of who he was. Writing kept him alive, I used to think, but like everything else, even that left him. Barely able to hold a pen, he wrote his final poem, one of the most beautiful pieces of verse I’ve ever heard, a few days before he died.

Pippa Griffin on Crush
I wrote the first draft of ‘Crush’ during a two-week writing retreat in Devon. I was flicking through my notebooks and found notes for a story about a crush, and there was something there niggling at me, so I thought I’d better write it. I wrote the story quickly – ideas for Frances’s experiences coming quicker than I could write them down, memories of my own childhood crushes and how they felt never far away.

Sam Duda on The Parrot
I had just left a job, a girlfriend and a city, and gone to live in Cornwall. I scratched around for a while before finding a job on a beach. The only other worker was a Czech boy, Milan. I was anxious, self-aware and obsessive. He was carefree, hedonistic and unflappable. I drank with him all summer, trying to parrot him – not just to impress, but because it seemed an easier, more enjoyable way to live. The following year I moved to Newcastle and found myself slightly more carefree, hedonistic and unflappable. That’s when I wrote the story.

Cally Taylor on Imagination Avenue
‘Imagination Avenue’ was inspired by students using ‘For Sale’ boards to sledge down my street during one particularly snowy winter. They were so full of joy and glee they reminded me of children. I started to think about other occasions when I’d seen adults play – normally board games at Christmas – and the way even the most ‘grown up’ of faces lights up as they get lost in the moment. There’s something about playing that temporarily frees us from our day-to-day responsibilities and worries but, as adults, we’re far too self-conscious most of the time.

Click here to see the full list of interviews.

Click here for more on The Route Book at Bedtime

Train of Ice and Fire Review

A Review of The Train of Ice and Fire features in Candela, the newly launched magazine for Latin and Spanish lifestyle in the UK. candelalive.co.uk

‘Classic train journeys evoke certain romanticism.The Orient Express is associated with luxury and refinement, the Trans Siberian joins Europe with Asia and the Pacific Ocean, and the Palace on Wheels recreates a glorious past through Rajasthan in India.  The Train of Ice and Fire evokes none of these.

Of all the places where a great train journey can be done, Manu Chao chose a country where there are no running trains and the rail network is in ruins: Colombia. This eccentric adventure takes Manu Chao, his band Mano Negra, acrobats, tattooists, various other entertainers, Manu’s father – the chronicler – and Roberto, a fire breathing Dragon, through the heartlands of Colombia in a bric-a-brac train named La Consentida.

The sole purpose of the journey: to stop at abandoned stations and entertain for free the disenfranchised people who live close by. Descending from the Altiplano – 2,500 metres above sea level – to the Northern Coast of Colombia, passing through Aracataca the hometown of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the adventure took this group of artists through some of the most beautiful and diverse scenery in the world.

Ramón’s description of the various sights, the vegetation, mountains, valleys and so on, transmits a sense of wonder, almost a feeling of disbelief in front of such well hidden beauty. However, it was the people who they encountered that amazed them most. The journey turned into a splendid rendezvous of cultures and people; a bunch of French entertainers and the simplest of people in Colombia, but also the warmest and probably the more intrigued at seeing this bunch of French gypsies in their small towns. Ramón illustrates this beautifully by noting how a terrified Colombian girl asked him how French men make love…’

Click here for the full review on Candela magazine.

Click here for more on The Train of Ice and Fire

A Just and Lasting Peace eBook

We start the new decade with the man most likely to shape it. ‘Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future.’ Barack Obama’s Nobel lecture in full sets out a course of action for the coming ten years.

Barack Obama’s election as US President in 2008 was greeted with a euphoria unprecedented in recent times, not just from the people of his own country but from people all around the world. The investment of hope placed in him was cemented when in 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his ‘extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples’.

The Nobel Foundation added to Obama’s charge, ‘His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.’

Eleven months into his presidency, it would be natural if a man’s ideology had been softened by the realities of responsibility. In this Nobel lecture, Obama balances his responsibilities as commander-in-chief of the world’s sole superpower with his mandate for hope, reconciliation and human progress. Marking the end of a shameful first decade of this century, he draws carefully from his own personal and national history, and sets out a pragmatic manifesto of his global responsibilities and a outlines a promise of a new kind of leadership.

Available as epub (Sony reader, iPhone etc) and pdf ebook formats, plus there’s a video of the full speech too. Click here to get a copy.

Image of the Obama’s by Luke Vargas: Licensed by Attribution Share Alike 2.0

La Rochelle Launch Event Video

A video of the launch event for Michael Nath’s novel La Rochelle, held at 309 Regent Street, London. Includes a short reading from the book. (8:50)

Click here for more details on Michael Nath and La Rochelle.

La Rochelle Launch

Michael Nath’s novel La Rochelle was unveiled at a private launch event at the University of Westminster’s Regent Street site last night. A hundred or so gathered to hear Michael talk and read a little from the book, then retired to a crowded upstairs room at the nearby – and highly fitting – Green Man pub for food and drink. It was a splendid occasion.

I’ve been working with Michael on the book for nearly three years, so it was a big moment to reveal it last night. In three years of anyone’s life, there are certain moments and experiences that bring about personal change. I’ve had several such moments in this time. What has been remarkable about La Rochelle is that after each shift, when I’ve returned to work on the manuscript, certain passages have shone out at me in a surprisingly new way, so new it was as though I hadn’t even read them before. The text had a profound impact, directly linked to the experience I had just had. There is a maxim that when a reader picks up a book the question they ask of it is to ‘tell me about me’. There are very few books that have taught me as much about myself as La Rochelle.

In one session held here at Route HQ about eighteen months ago, we’d been working on the text all day. It was late at night and we were smoking cigarettes; relaxing after a long hard day of deconstructing and reconstructing the manuscript.

‘I’ve been asked to make a short presentation,’ I told him. ‘The subject is “What is great art?”. I think they might have got the wrong man.’

He began to shuffle in his seat and draw deeply on his cigarette.

I could see that he was excited by the idea, in many ways this was a subject which was much closer to his line of work than it was to mine – he’s a lecturer in modernist literature. The introduction of the presentation gave us the opportunity to turn the tables and for him to edit my ideas for a change, following a heavy day of me editing his.

‘You know what it is though, don’t you Ian?’

I suggested that I’m not sure if I do, and if I do, I’m not sure that I could articulate it.

‘Think about what you’ve been telling me all day and simply say that,’ he offered as he stood to continue with his suggestion.

‘Say that great art has to work on two levels. Firstly, it has to work on the surface. It has to offer immediate satisfaction, draw you in and give you something there and then. Secondly, it has to work on a deeper level and continue to work again and again. You must be able to revisit it and it needs to work just as well, if not better, on the second, third, fourth time of asking. It must last.’

He cited the reading of Hamlet as a prime example.

After living with La Rochelle over these years and reading through it on what must be more than twenty occasions in great detail, I can report that this book is another prime example. On reading through, the book’s wit is likely to make you laugh out loud, but underneath it is working away in layers at a deeper, profound level. The recent improvement in my physical health can be attributed in part to this text. If it were only that that I should thank this book for, then that would be more than enough.

If you are one of the many who grumble at the lack of adventure in modern publishing, then I highly recommend you take a look at La Rochelle.

Ian Daley

La Rochelle is released in March 2010, but advance copies are now available for immediate dispatch direct from the Route website. Click here.

Born in the 1980s Review

A review of Born in the 1980s from James Hogg at Inpress. Born in the 1980s is now available for the Sony Reader, iPhone etc in Epub format. Get it here.

‘As someone born in Orwell’s year of ’84, I’ve always been a bit uneasy about being part of ‘a generation’. Growing up in the nineties and noughties, that whole notion of identity is so much more slippery now compared to those halcyon / bad-hair days of the 60s, 70s and 80s. And whereas that generation produced some of the most enduring popular icons ever, my generation is best represented by those novelty T-shirts with the Thundercats or the Transformers on the front… My Generation? They had The Who, and we got Limp Bizkit; say no more.

It’s this same paradoxical feeling of detachment in a never-better-connected world that cuts through Route’s latest short-story collection. These are tales of the re- and de-location that so often follows hitting your twenties, in an age where everything is derivative, and it’s harder and harder to carve out a place in the world.

Many of the stories deal with relationships in their many forms: with love/hate, with car-crash romances and family break-ups, with the helpless, sometimes hopeless cycles of the dating game. We see the full gamut of emotions from that hinterland between child- and adulthood: from the rose-tinted nostalgia for a simpler life left behind, to the spectre of mortality that haunts even so young an age. Most rewardingly, though, there are plenty of flashes of the self-deprecating, ironic humour that a generation weaned on the Spice Girls and social networking does so well.

Of the 10 stories, my personal favourites would be Sally Jenkinson’s ‘Brown Rice’ – a jaunty yet melancholic Polaroid of single, too-much-too-young parenthood – and Sam Duda’s ‘The Things I Learned About Leah Today’, a diary on office flirtation that slowly, almost imperceptibly skews into something far less sweet and innocent.

A provocative, comforting, challenging anthology.

James Hogg’

For more on Born in the 1980s, click here.

To visit Inpress, click here.