ON THE POD THIS MONTH

 
 

OUT Now

CAFES - HOLLY PESTER

On this episode Sam speaks to Holly Pester about her latest poetry collection Cafés (published by Fitzcarraldo.) Here, Holly explores four iterations of the café dream, first as a trap for its unassuming owner - a café with ‘the same ambience as a letter of resignation’. Then a café for lovers, who wait endlessly, only for their lover’s lover to arrive - ‘an engine room of corporate consciousness and horny married couples.’

We spend time ‘on set’ in a café for friends, a place where friendship is ‘performed’ and the cafe-goers become ‘watching shapes blurred against glass.’ And finally we head to the Café Des Artistes where the ultimate cannibalisation of dreams occurs. Described by Fitzcarraldo as both a ‘stylish, political intervention and an elegy for communal space,’ Holly’s writing is, as ever, resistant, loving, vivid and wildly funny - always running ahead of you, waiting as you turn the page only to lead you further on in..

Upcoming Dates :

Holly will be at Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 29th in conversation with Anthony Tao at (the rather terrifyingly named) Venue B. So, if that is your neck of the woods, do get along because Holly Pester reading live is unmissable.

https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/holly-pester-anthony-tao-a-place-like-no-other

Praise for Cafes

‘Holly Pester’s café is a place to sink into the soft leather couches, eavesdrop, work and dream: a waiting room both strange and familiar, full of spillages (of coffee) and slippages (of language). A public space or a place to hide; to meet friends and strangers or to be alone; Pester’s brilliance builds this café up and invites us in to linger.’
― Francesca Wade, author of Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife

‘Holly Pester makes the world sing. The song is written by Victoria Wood, and it’s a happy-sad song about utopia. Figured not as a distant place but as a way of being with people and things, that might also be called friendship, that might also be called poetry. She reminds us that poetry is a social activity, an expression of faith in the possibility of connection – with other people, with the world, with happiness – that feels, in our historical moment, like a form of resistance.’ 
― Ben Eastham, author of The Floating World

‘Romance! Revolution! Happy work! Salad! In this ingenious and devastatingly funny work, the perky smooth surfaces of contemporary capitalism are vivisected to show fleshy conflicts and writhing contradictions. On life’s menu can we actually pick our options, rather than just onions? Can we dare to experience one another outside of the transaction? Cafés is a striking and vital work of dreaming and dream interpretations, a clarion call for interruption that will “make thoughts paddle”. Enter the café, scooch closer and awaken your critique!’
― Lila Matsumoto, author of Two Twin Pipes Sprout Water

 



OUT NOw

THE END OF EVERYTHING - M. JOHN HARRISON

Few writers have reshaped British speculative fiction as quietly, or as radically, as M. John Harrison. Over a career spanning more than five decades, he has dismantled genre tropes across science fiction, fantasy, and literary fiction—earning accolades from the Arthur C. Clarke Award to the Goldsmiths Prize. Hailed by writers including Olivia Laing and Robert MacFarlane as one of the most brilliant prose stylists alive today, his work is instantly recognisable. Beautifully strange, subversive and written with a poet’s economy.

Now, in his latest, Booker-longlisted novel The End of Everything, he confronts the corrosive and alien presence of capitalism in a world inexplicably unraveling. Refusing easy answers or heroic arcs, the reader is taken to an England where the disaster at hand is too vast, complex, and banal to fully articulate. A society where adaptation is the stuff of fiction and whose inhabitants can only think to keep going as an apocalypse of sorts rumbles on. It is eerily familiar stuff - a world unmoored from truth and made hostile by the reflex to exploit.

Upcoming Dates

PRAISE FOR THE END OF EVERYTHING

The New Statesman

‘M.John Harrison is the closest thing we have to a present-day Wyndham or Ballard.’

Simon Ings, The Telegraph

‘Harrison isn’t weirder than most other writers, just better. Reading The End of Everything, you feel you’re not so much reading as dreaming. Or, to put it another way, this novel is like a painting by Paul Nash, chalky, degreased and illumined. As Harrison himself says: by “a pure 1930s light, from an imagination stocked when people could use words like ‘spiritual’ and still mean something”.’

Niall Harrison, Locus Mag
‘Many of M. John Harrison’s previous novels warn about the fantastic as a consolation, and the risks of exceeding the appropriate prescription, and I think The End of Everything may also be read as a depiction of a world subject to overdose, where lives have been saturated by the unreal. There is a grain of ambiguous hope in one character’s declara­tion that it doesn’t matter that the world has ended, “because another one will be along soon enough,” but what I felt when the novel released me was more immediate. I felt the urge to go outside, to run around and shout, not to celebrate the novel’s bril­liance (although I think it is brilliant), but simply to prove that, for now, something real still exists.’