Bøger udgivet af Grand Iota

Brian Marley is best known for his absurdist novel Apropos Jimmy Inkling in which a notorious celebrity is tried and sentenced in absentia in a kangaroo court hastily convened in a London coffee shop; and for his riotous collection of short fictions The Shenanigans, a collision of Kafka and comicbook hyperrealism. On Reflection is something different. In his other guise as a photographer, Marley presents a sequence of images, mainly shot through glass (typically shop windows), in Newcastle upon Tyne, Southsea, the Italian town of Bergamo, and various locations throughout Sussex. But our attention is distracted from the ostensible content of each photo by the reflected presence of a man, often wearing a hat, sometimes barely visible, always disruptive. That's the photographer himself, normally the one element absent from photographs (selfies aside), caught in the act of taking the picture we're looking at. And associated with each image is a text: a micro-story. The first begins: "Catching sight of himself makes him feel physically ill, so he takes pains to avoid mirrors. But despite his best efforts he sees himself everywhere he looks." From which point the absurdities multiply, to tragicomic effect.

Despite the fact that eleven very various deaths are recounted in these four stories (plus an ineffective attempt at mass murder), it is the variety of lives and voices that this collection celebrates. As John Kerrigan wrote of Russell's first collection of poems, "I find an exciting range of structures in the collection, always reaching out for a scale that can catch the amplitude of life." We hear how a super-head's life is brought into the light by a cerebral event and a trip to Paris, how a Cambridge philosophy postgrad's budding sense of moral outrage blossoms into tragedy, how a Californian schoolteacher in the very early years of the 20th Century is accidentally given a fatal power that leads her to Greenwich Village, and how a seemingly blind actor comes to wonder if his dreams are illuminating or occluding his life.

We live, according to the Chinese curse, in "interesting times". Climate change, endless war, the disappearance of a former way of life, items missing from grocery shelves, mad rushes for toilet paper, the emergence of a digital world and the creep of totalitarianism. You Know There's Something is a reflective, monologic sounding of troubling events, but also a celebration of the many quiet and subtle pleasures available when we take the time to notice them.

The ultimate solution to the problem of how to maintain a leisure society without conflict and unrest. A universal welfare system that everybody is entitled to access, an ingenious apparatus of benefit that replaces and improves all previous systems. Peace reigns. Utopia at last!Or is it? The price is silence, and the method for ensuring compliance entails nothing less than policing each individual's access to the alphabet, regulating exactly what can and cannot be said by them. At its heart it's fiendishly simple: the greater the benefit you're allocated the fewer letters you receive, freeing you from the tyranny of the alphabet. But if you dare to speak out of turn....THE ALPHABET TAX tells the story of the rise and fall of this system of silence in a montage of documents: following trails of paper, conference presentations, building specifications, first-person testimonies, from concept to strategy to delivery and final tragedy.

OF DISCOURSE is a novel-length hybrid of prose and verse, structured along a trajectory determined by syntax, as if function-words could have their own thesaurus, each word generating meaning while remaining in itself opaque.Giles Goodland comments: "What is BE? If we start to break the word open, make a list of its uses, constituents, inflections, what do we find? For years, while I worked for the Oxford English Dictionary, I kept a list of examples of function words in use. Not just BE, but prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, and a few verbs that did not suggest much in the way of a specific action. Anything that seemed to lack a semantic aspect, or in which the function of the word was more important than its meaning. After I had assembled an almost unmanageably large file of phrases and sentences, both from external sources and from my own writings, I started to assemble 'poems' from them...."The resulting texts are expansive and extraordinary: a series of quotations, collages, reframings, imitations, homages and homologies, referencing myths ancient and contemporary, computer games, instruction manuals, diary entries. They are mysterious, surreal, comical and lyrical, suggesting endless avenues of invention.

A reimagining of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 18-month domicile in England, during which he came to believe his former friends and benefactors were part of an international conspiracy to discredit him.

A short novel using Oulipian constraints in telling the story of Edith Bone, a writer falsely accused of spying and imprisoned in solitary confinement.

1970s London: short-life communal living, the beginnings of the alt-poetry scene, not forgetting sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Forty years on: where have the wild metrics of those days taken us?This prose extravaganza dives into the inscrutable forking paths of memory, questions what poetry is, and concludes that the author cannot know what he is doing. Among the cast of characters are a Rock Star who has become a national treasure, a bunch of poets and writers, some now legends, and assorted other misfits and malcontents. Some names have been changed.

In a Westminster café-cum-courtroom, Jimmy Inkling is on trial, perhaps for his life. Unless, of course, he's dead already. But will that be enough to prevent him from eliminating those who give evidence against him?Apropos Jimmy Inkling is a wild, lysergic riff on that hoary staple, the courtroom drama, which, for better or worse, Marley makes his own.