Connecting Nothing with Something

Budden, Gary

Influx Press

Marshland is a deep map of the east London marshes, a blend of local history, folklore and weird fiction, where nothing is quite as it seems. Cocker spaniel by his side, Rees wanders the marshes of Hackney, Leyton and Walthamstow, avoiding his family and the pressures of life. He discovers a lost world of Victorian filter plants, ancient grazing lands, dead toy factories and tidal rivers on the edgelands of a rapidly changing city. Ghosts are his friends. As strange tales of bears, crocodiles, magic narrowboats and apocalyptic tribes begin to manifest themselves, Rees embarks on a psychedelic journey across time and into the dark heart of London. It soon becomes clear that the very existence of the marshland is at threat. For on all sides, the developers are closing in ...

Marshland

Literature & Fiction

Rees, Gareth E.

Contemporary

Western Sahara, is a former Spanish colony on the north west coast of Africa. Following the death of Franco (1975) and subsequent invasion by Morocco and Mauritania, the territory has been under occupation, the people denied self-determination land annexed as the 'southern provinces of the Kingdom of Morocco'.Around half of the former nomadic people of Western Sahara (the Saharawi) live in refugee camps around the isolated desert of Tindouf over the border in Algeria. 2015 marks the 40th year of exile. Poetry is a cultural tradition in the Western Sahara that goes back millennia.In 2013 poet Sam Berkson was invited by the charity Olive Branch to visit these camps as a poet in residence. In March 2014, following a successful crowdfunding campaign, Influx Press raised enough money to send him back to gather and translate some of the contemporary poetry of the Saharawi.Settled Wanderers is a collection of interpreted (Hassaniya to English) poems from the greatest living poets of the Western Sahara, such as Badi, Beyibouh and Al Khadra. They have been translated into English by Sam and a Saharawi translator and illustrator Mohamed Labat Sulaiman.The book also contains a fascinating essay by American academics Stephen Zunes and Jacob Mundy explaining the history of the region, and a foreword from a Saharawi Senior official of the Saharawi Arab Demcoratic Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs and writer, Mustafa Kattab, outlining the history of Saharawi poetry. Settled Wanderers features poems Sam wrote while in residence at the refugee camp where he captures the spirit, life and unique culture of 'Africa's last colony'.This is first time a collection of poetry from the Western Sahara has been translated and interpreted into English. Additionally, Settled Wanderers contains some of the original Hassani

Settled Wanderers: The Poetry of a Landless People

Sam Berkson

Poetry

Inspired by the surreal accounts of the explorer and 'man of a million lies' Marco Polo, Imaginary Cities charts the metropolis and the imagination, and the symbiosis therein. A work of creative nonfiction, the book roams through space, time and possibility, mapping cities of sound, melancholia and the afterlife, where time runs backwards or which float among the clouds. In doing so, Imaginary Cities seeks to move beyond the cliches of psychogeography and hauntology, to not simply revisit the urban past, or our relationship with it, but to invade and reinvent it. Following in the lineage of Borges, Calvino, Chris Marker and Kenneth White, the book examines the city from global macrocosm to the microcosm of its inhabitants' perspectives. It proceeds through opium dreams, sea voyages, the hallucinations of prisoners, nocturnal decadence, impossible Soviet skyscrapers, marauding golems, subterranean civilisations, apocalyptic prophecies and the work of architectural visionaries such as Antonio Sant'Elia, Archigram and Buckminster Fuller. It rethinks the ideas of utopias and dystopias, urban exploration, alienation and resistance.It claims that the Situationists lacked ambition when they suggested, "Beneath the paving stones, the beach. " Instead, beneath the paving stones, we may just be able to discern the entire universe. Imaginary Cities demonstrates that each city dreamt up by artists, writers, architects and lunatics has a real-life equivalent and that the great Marco Polo was no liar. Imaginary Cities need not simply exist in fiction or the mind. We already inhabit them.

Imaginary Cities

Anderson, Darran

History & Criticism

AN UNRELIABLE GUIDE TO LONDON brings together twenty-six stories about the lesser known parts of a world renowned city. Stories that stretch the reader's definition of the truth. Stories that have you questioning whether reality, and fiction simultaneously. Stories that will tell you there are wind nymphs in North Clapham tube station, a horse sized swan at Brentford Ait, Sleeping Clinics in NW3 and celebrations for St Margaret's Day of the Dead. Taking its cue from travel guides, London histories and books like Tired of London, Tired of Life, AN UNRELIABLE GUIDE TO LONDON will shake up the canon of London writing with a tongue firmly routed in its cheek.UNRELIABLE GUIDE TO LONDON is the perfect summer read for city dwellers up and down the country. With a list of contributors reflecting the multilayered, complex social structures of the city, it is the perfect guide to London showing you everything that you never knew existed.Features stories from M John Harrison, Yvvette Edwards, Chloe Aridjis, Nikesh Shukla, Courttia Newland, Juliet JaquesWill Wiles, Irenosen Okojie, Paul Ewen, Noo Saro Wiwa, Salena Godden and many more

An Unreliable Guide to London

Caless, Kit

Literary

HOLD TIGHT is a book about being black, British and born after 1980. It's also about Grime.Celebrating over fifty key songs that make up Grime's DNA, Jeffrey Boakye explores the meaning of the music and why it has such resonance in the UK. Boakye also examines the representation of masculinity in the music and the media that covers it.Both a loving critique of Grime and an investigation into life as a black man in Britain today, HOLD TIGHT puts seminal tracks like Moschino, Creeper, Next Hype, Too Many Man, Rhythm and Gash, I Can C U and...Do They Know It's Christmas 2004, into perspective.Insightful, very funny and stacked with sentences you'll want to pull up and read again, HOLD TIGHT rolls deep, giving a context to Grime that hasn't been given before.

Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime

Jeffrey Boakye

Plastic Emotions is a novel based on the true life story of Minnette de Silva, the first female Sri Lankan architect. In a gripping and lyrical novel, Shiromi Pinto charts Minnette's affair with famed modernist Le Corbusier and her efforts to build a postindependence Sri Lanka. Set in London, Chandigarth, Colombo, Paris and Kandy, Plastic Emotions explores the life of a young, trailblazing south Asian woman at a time of great political turbulence across the globe. From communal violence in Sri Lanka, forewarning the rise of the civil war, to troubles with building a brand new city in north India, de Silva's life is pinned to several key moments in subcontinental history. This novel paints a complex picture of de Silva, a forgotten feminist icon, one who is largely unknown in her home country, the rest of Asia and Europe. It is time the world learned about Minnette de Silva and Shiromi Pinto is the perfect author to tell her story.

Plastic Emotions

Shiromi Pinto

Built On Sand

Scraton, Paul

Lucifer Over London

Travel

Aridjis, Chloe

Travel Writing

Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime [New Edition]

Arts & Photography

Music

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