Cheers to all the good people who beamed into our earlier live video transmission discussing the magic of novellas, but if you missed it you can watch the playback here. Unfortunately, there were some technical issues with Tom’s connection which affected his audio, but I hope you can glean his contribution through the occasional gaps.
Despite the gremlins, it was a fun and fascinating conversation about novellas: its form, its flexibility, and some of our favourite examples, both older and more recent.
We also talked about our forthcoming novellas from Absinthe Books (a PS Publishing imprint), the ideas behind them, and how they evolved. Here are the links and the blurbs:
Rowan Byrne hasn’t stolen anything for ages—not since she started to straighten her life out after a personal tragedy. But the volume she’s just picked up in the new bookshop in town seems to want her to steal it. The text is very persuasive. There’s a book for everyone in Legends—a book that will encourage their worst impulses. Steal. Fear. Burn. Kill. It’s not long before Rowan’s small town, isolated from the outside world, is descending into mayhem. Assailed by her own demons, Rowan could try to cut and run. Or she could make a stand, and try to save the community she loves . . .
House of Wyrd by Maura McHugh
Aly Wyrd, famous art provocateur and magician, is missing on the eve of the opening of her visionary project, the Path of Illumination.
It falls to her estranged daughter, Pallas Trismegistus Morrigan Aylward, to navigate through dream, memory and arcane mystery to revisit her history
with her mother in ’80s London and ’90s Ireland until Pallas catches up with present-day revelation by walking the road to enlightenment designed by her mother.
The Lamp in the Window by Tom Mead
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin...
Each Christmas Eve, academic and antiquarian Roland Spence invites a select group of students to his quarters to indulge in a glass or two of port, and to listen to a ghostly tale by the fireside. It seems like an innocent enough tradition—after all, who doesn’t enjoy a wintry chill at Christmastime? Decades later, one of Spence’s students must revisit those half-remembered stories as a long-buried secret threatens to resurface...
Inspired by M.R. James, E.F. Benson, Algernon Blackwood et al, The Lamp in the Window is an eerie winter ghost story in the classic Victorian tradition.
Thank you so much to Helen and Tom for joining me in celebrating the novella!
As ever, we send our appreciation to our cover artists (Yorgos Cotronis, Lisa Laughy, & John Coulthart), to Managing Editor Marie O’Regan, publisher Nicky Crowther and the rest of the team for all their love and labour.
Viva novellas!
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