Sunday 21 February 2021

Vampires with Fairy Wings

Vampires with Fairy Wings (2021)

A selection of the surviving verse and prose poems of unjustly forgotten 1930s writer Victoria Plumjob. She was friends with André Breton, Salvador Dali, Chump Rumple, Edith Shriek and Roger Dammit Upstairs, and she was one of the leading lights of the Furious Ducks, an obscure avant-garde collective. Most of her work was lost in a series of bizarre accidents but enough remains to fill a slim volume (one of her poems was rescued by an owl from a burning canoe).

Victoria was a precocious child and began writing stories when she was very young. Her earliest publications were in ephemeral student magazines, few of which have successfully endured the ravages of time. The only collection of her work published in her lifetime was issued in a limited edition by Catwheel Press and is now extremely rare. Vampires with Fairy Wings is thus the first volume to feature her work for more than eighty years. It includes an excellent afterword by noted grammatical scholar Jaggery Feeley, and thanks to the efforts of historical researcher Nina Vangerow it also features photographs of Victoria published here for the very first time.

"This book strikes a valedictory note that is neither sharp nor flat but deserves to be struck anyway." -- Bernardo Puffin.

Monday 8 February 2021

The Pilgrim's Regress

The Pilgrim's Regress (2021)
Gloomy Seahorse Press

The picaresque exploits of a knight on a bicycle... The noble and chivalrous Don Cosquillas (more informally known as Arturo Risas of Madrid) hereby invites you to partake of his adventures as he roams with his trusty sidekick Sancho Panda over Spain and across Africa and all the way to India and the back of beyond. Metafictional and ticklish, he assures you that he has your best interests at heart and if you care to accompany him through these pages you will be richly rewarded, though in what manner he is quite at a loss to specify. No matter! Here be dragons, puppet masters, and all manner of curiosities and hobgoblins.

Contents:

Zucchini Overdrive * Musicians in the Cold * ¡Qué Pena! * How Don Cosquillas Earned his Name * Description of a Liar * Rhodomontade and Piffle * The Laughable Career of the Tickle Master * Risible and Shine * Astragal and Bingbong * Sackbut and Splashes * Tarzan of the Chardonnay * Found Kidneys * Up Without Away * Sinking Fast * Salad in Dallas * My Foot Walked Off Without Me * Westward Ivanhoe! * A Stitched Dog's Tongue * Topaz Days, Emerald Nights * Spider in Slippers * Making It Up As I Go Along * The Fantastical Scholar's Chop-Logic * ¿Qué Cosas? * The Puppet Masters of Tau Ceti * The Logistics of Fictional Life