Tooting Tales: A Celebration of Stories & Voices is a brand new two-day literary festival (Saturday 25th & Sunday 26th, 1-5pm), the entry for which is at a very Honest price: free. This year you’ll find a Mr Bogdan Tiganov reading from his book, The Wooden Tongue Speaks. Yes you heard us, Tiganov will be dusting-off his Sunday best, and hopefully sobering-up, to be wheeled-out to read to the general public and maybe even take a few questions about Honest Publishing, should you wish to pick his noggin.

And if you’re going to pop down and say hello, why not take part in the originally named and free to enter Honest Publishing Writer’s Competition. We and the good guys from The Brick Box in Tooting Market will be encouraging all you good folk to sit down and write…anything. The only rule is, you must write it on the day and at our writer’s desk! Yes, they still exist (now). Why not pretend you’re Dickens, Orwell, or Bogdan Tiganov ( The Wooden Tongue Speaks priced £8.99)?

You can write anything: a poem, short story, your own obituary, whatever gets your juices flowing. And the winner will be published on our blog and receive the current range of Honest Publishing titles (that’s 6 books) plus a first-off-the-press copy of our latest book, Nothing Doing by Willie Smith, before anyone else. Now if that doesn’t sound exciting, I don’t know what we can say to make you excited…probably not very much…other than, the pizza’s arrived and Strictly’s on.

The place: The Brick Box, Tooting Market. The time: 25th February, 1-5pm. The vibes: good to fair depending on hangover. See you Saturday.

The Brick Box - Photo: Adrian Flower

Iceberg is very different to The Killing of a Bank Manager…
PK: I wanted Iceberg to be a fast and fun read. I wanted to use a conventional style, I didn’t want to tax the reader, I wanted the read itself to be pleasurable. My intention with The Killing of a Bank Manager was to make the read as onerous as the character’s journey. I wanted each footstep the character took on his journey to murder to be extremely difficult for the reader, the psychology of the character to be matched by the paragraphs, sentences, and those long, obscure words. I wanted the reader’s journey to mirror Henry’s journey. Iceberg is the antithesis to The Killing of a Bank Manager in style; nevertheless, I have my fun.

What inspired Iceberg?
PK: Did you know that the Black Death reduced the world population from an estimated 450 million to between 350 and 375 million? I was reading a book about the Black Death, after just finishing Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, his best book, and I read about how some of the people profited just by having the luck to outlast the Black Death. This got me thinking, as long as there are people that survive an apocalypse, there will be those that profit. Dante’s Divina Commedia inspired Iceberg, but so did Whale Wars on Animal Planet, and pictures of the debris after the Japan earthquake.

Tell us about the process of writing Iceberg…
PK: I sat down and I typed out the words. It produced a mellifluous sound. Instead of walking boots, a rucksack and a passport, I opened many books. I had an aunt write to me about the streets around her house, about her local pub, about the doctor’s waiting room. I have a proclivity for reading travel books and memoirs, Robert Byron, Leigh Patrick Fermor, and Bruce Chatwin. I waited until I was in a state of hypnagogia and before sleep I quickly filled a notebook.

Did you mean Iceberg to be uplifting?
PK: Yes, I wanted to write an uplifting apocalyptic tale. When the kettle drums bang and the trumpets blow I want some Parker or Gillespie. You can’t beat Bosch’s oranges or the humor in The Triumph of Death. Just look closely at the peerless oranges and witness the jester scurrying under the table.

You mention Boris Vian in Iceberg…
PK: The importance of Vian to my writing is immeasurable. That there is not a movie of Vian projected onto the moon playing his music is a travesty.

I think at eight o’clock every night Vian should be on the moon and that we should turn off the television and computers and remove the headphones and watch and listen to Vian.

I don’t think Vian wrote with constraints as Raymond Queneau did, but I write without constraints, in my writing anything can happen and will happen, I disdain rules and fashions, I would like to use every word in the dictionary, no matter how long or how obscure, I love adverbs, I love long and short sentences, I love obfuscation and Byzantine sentences, I love clear and concise sentences, I want to write about things that are silly, I want to irk, to vex the reader, to make the reader giggle, laugh, scream, cry, more importantly laugh as a child would laugh. Vian makes me laugh like a child.

What do you think about Don and Phoebe?
PK: I don’t. They are as alive as the words on the page, they are as intricate as the letters that make up the words, they are as colorful as the ink.

Are we all going to end up on an iceberg or are we just giving away the ending?
PK: Not an iceberg, but a big ball of ice nevertheless.

What’s next for Paul Kavanagh?
PK: The Kingdom of Kaleidoscopes.

Iceberg, by Paul Kavanagh, is out now.

Did ideas for how to illustrate Iceberg come easily to you?
Alex Chilvers: The ideas for how to illustrate Iceberg came very easily to me. The book is very descriptive and creates lots of very interesting visuals to work from. In each of the three sections in the book, the main characters keep moving into different environments which evokes diverse emotions. This gave me lots of visuals to work from.

The images in Iceberg are linocuts – what is it about this printmaking method you like? How do you feel it aligns with Iceberg?
AC: I like the way that any printmaking method seems to really enhance an image. I like linocuts as you get a very bold image. They’re great for black and white images and you get that handmade effect which I thought would work well with the spontaneity of the book.

A lot of your work focuses on cities, city-dwellers. What do you find so appealing about such subjects?
AC: I like to capture little snapshots of people’s lives. Big cities can be so busy, I think some people don’t always realise their surroundings. I like to draw things that go unnoticed or express them in a different way. There’s so much going on in a city like London that there’s always something or someone interesting around the next corner.

Do you have much experience with dreary Northern towns?
AC: I grew up in Grimsby on the North East coast. I really like it when I read about Northern towns. Although they’re usually described as being dreary they are great places. I thought that Iceberg really captured the sense of the Northern town and Don and Phoebe’s escape was something I could really relate to.

Which artists are the most important influences on your work?
AC: I’ve been a huge fan of the artist and illustrator Aldous Eveleigh since he taught me life drawing at university. His work is great and always inspires me to do more drawing and see things differently.

______________________
More of Alex’s work can be found at his website. He comes with a hearty Honest recommendation.

Tears stream down my spotless, ageless, face – I was meant for this.

My child walks into the room, my sublime daughter who loves me and calls me daddy. She is BEAUTIFUL. I turn towards the window and the light flecks off of my profile. I must appear very intellectual, full of beans, delicate.

I’ve not lost hope, oh no, don’t you worry about that. There’s light at the end of my tunnel even if the candle-holder is a mystical man of ninety-four who despises me for all the right reasons, all the wrong clichés. He plays piano pretty well like that guy from The Pianist.

My wife walks in followed by my father, her father, his father. They sit down at my magnificent faux-marble table. My uncle serves the food, every plate is a work of art. He’s cooked it himself, an expert, trained under Michel Roux. Dinner’s ready announces my lovely wife who gives me her special smile, reserved for me only. The smile tells me that our love is everlasting and the meal is delicious. I smile back in the same way. We will grow old together and die old together, yes we will.

A fox marches to the window. It stares at me, unafraid, and, in the serene greenness of my garden, screams. Arthouse. This is when I take out my razor-blade and slit open the pigs in the room, turn the key and splice open tendons. This is when I bellow out my heart of darkness and exhaust the sun, batter back light, take grey from the sky and envelop the dogville of our chalked-up-pruned-bonsai existence – finally, some cool indie tune whispers in, swirls on, that’s it, the mystery of life is the mystery I express.

My wife says hurry up, the food’s getting cold. I realise there are too many men sitting at the table. The aggression is hysterical. Want some help? You look tired. I’m fine. I can do it. Look after dad. I wheel myself over to the table. Luckily, instead of talking, strings blank out conversation. Wonder what I’ll do next? Once I recover my ability to give a shit. The wine glass is full but not for long as everyone dips their beaks, hammer back heads like wolves after slaughter.

A noise, a whirr, a buzz, a slither, my father-in-law is a despicable man but we understand each other tonight. What’s that in the corridor? My father-in-law is overweight and he’s lost his hair. His permanent expression is fed-up, head in the gas oven. He owns a shotgun, once threatened to pull out my toenails if I didn’t lend him a few quid. I said here have it, loser. When I was young I wanted to earn big but I married big instead.

In Easy Town everyone plays the same song. No one suspects me. I am like them. Except I’m not. No more music, wait patiently for the sex scene, sweat, muscle, the same boring positions every time, backside pointed towards the ceiling, moonshine. I am a big drinker. A cowboy. A killer. And a writer for I write their letters, their shopping lists and their poems. I’ll write anything for a few bob. I am shameless.

Grin.

Bogdan Tiganov

STRANGERS ON A TURKEY

I just can’t see myself looking into the glass, being unable to see myself. Bloody Mary’s confuse me bloody enough. Turned all the mirrors days ago to the wall. Like turning away from advice from the inner self: I suspect it’s foolish, but feels better this way. I like, in any event, the vertigo the turning away instils.
Sit in the kitchen alone – staring at the fridge – between practicing scales on a bone flute. Stand in the bedroom contemplating – between memorizing paradigms – the drawn shade. Lie on the couch in the media room – between commercials on the news – counting spiders on the ceiling. Stalk through the house, sipping vodka stained with V-8 juice and celery stalk…
I just can’t see myself asking the mirror why I can’t see myself.
Leafing through a Romanian grammar, my thoughts wander: Suppose it’s not true: Suppose I’m not Dracula’s blood descendant? Still fear garlic in the sauce; dread the sight of a cross; commune with upsidedown spiders eking overhead?
Compose a tune on my ulna flute. Words ride the notes like paper boats a stream, or shades a dream:
Narcissus – no vampire,
Disintegrated on his pyre.
Despite every place
I go or think
Narcissus haunts. At
Every blink – catch him,
Daffodil in hair,
Fall with his own face in
Love, tumbling through the pond
Of himself pondering…
Narcissus be my vampire,
Reintegrated on your pyre!
The news does me no good. It’s the commercials hackle my blood. I abandon the bugs to sit up for some sucker agonizing in the mirror, opening the medicine chest, lunging for pills. How I envy Mad Avenue vampirism! This tableau of subtle paranoia not only gives me a headache, so slick is the actor at his craft, but makes me feel left out without a supply of acetaminophen, a liver toxin proven to do absolutely nothing, beyond cause death in large doses. Then a babe sells a car that will set me free as a finance company permits; another slut insists I shop exclusively at Safeway; and it’s back to the zombie droning war, famine, pestilence, a joke about a dope and his dog in Idaho to top it all off, long before which I’m prone again, returning my attention to the handful of arachnids dotting the acoustic.
Soon let the eyes close. After after-images of tiny black eight-legged bloodsuckers finish fading, the moon tugs the blood. See the Sea of Crises – oval pock near the top of the waxing crescent. Imagine myself to be Orlando searching that smooth gray for my brains. Orlando the Furious penned nearly a century before some telescopist named the blemish barely visible to the naked eye after an ocean of unspecified crises. For eons it has been known, perhaps even to the spiders, that lost brains hide themselves on our satellite.
If he can’t see himself looking into a mirror, Orlando reflects, never will his brain anywhere appear.
Sit bolt upright. Bolt past a ghoul obsessing on death in Afghanistan into the kitchen. Yank open fridge. Remove bowl. Dive into blood pudding. Right here on the counter, don’t even bother to sit down or grab a spoon. Dig in with fingers. Sometimes, when mirrors refuse to stop re-entering my thoughts, pigging out helps.
Spiders don’t suck just blood, I think to myself, slurping pudding. Once the fangs have inflicted coma, they poke an opening into the near-dead; vomit through the wound digestive juices. Which rapidly liquefy the innards. Only then does the sucking begin. Spiders imbibe body-temperature half-digested meat milkshakes. Still, I can’t help but feel kinship. Kinship itself a species of metaphor – a flesh and blood comparison.
Remind myself, cupping palm to swab the bowl, blood pudding actually a sausage. Mine – this goo concocted from a pint of my own ichor. Cup of starch to thicken. Sweeten to taste with wild sage honey. Like the sage who drinks his own urine, my vampirism both starts and stays at home.
Lick last scabbing gobs off ceramic. Toss bowl in sink. Throw together a BM: four jiggers Popov, teaspoon V-8, flaccid stalk from refrigerator bottom.
Stalk, drink in hand, out of the kitchen, through the bedroom. Stop at the front door. The only door. Eye the unturnable knob. No knock, of course – now, then, or ever. Interruption impossible.
Because we – me, the mirrors, the media, the grammar, the flute, the bugs, other life and objects I can’t see – breathe and fill up space inside a ship. Morons designed the surroundings to resemble a bungalow – to lower my discomfort at being lightyears in the black from nowhere. Figured this better than the padded cell décor endemic to all other space movies.
Or this just a junket to the moon, memory recycling time’s blood, fooling me into taking a second for a year, light slow as molasses in absolute zero? Wish they had stocked Absolut, mutter to the faux keyhole, bolting down the BM. Make a drier drink.
I could be a seed. Or an experiment to see how long I can survive this crazy. If the former, there must be a colony of me each in his own ship outside the drawn shades drawn on the walls. Seems farfetched, especially female me’s…
So often when the thoughts space, when they slip their vampire pylons, I conclude I’m a probe escaped from observation, a tincan of instruments lost across a sea of crises, washed up on the shore of an uncertain principal of a kindergarten for the soul. Beyond the reach of even the remotest fairy tale or Milky Way myth; say nought of monitoring devices…
Drift into the sleeping chamber. Clack empty glass on dresser. Pick facedown grammar up off bed. Rather than pick up where I left off with memorizing the pluperfect, I riffle the glossary in back, pick out the Romanian for: “I just can’t see myself looking into… ” Halfway through the sentence realize it’s mirrors again.
Toss paperback back onto bed. Roam into the bathroom. Flip up toilet seat. Take a leak. Bouquet of booze piss tickles nostrils; triggers yesterday’s bone flute ditty:
Away to nothing Echo pines,
Save her voice among the pines.
Her love quite unrequited,
Not even regarded
By the youth lost in self-regarding,
Fallen in love with his
Own features reversed.
Echo chases Echo
While the mirror lures
Narcissus. Narcissus
No vampire,
Though his image be.
Electricity in the air.
Electricity in the wire.
Empty souls fill with
Electricity on fire.
Dance off the last of the pee (although impossible ever to dance the last droplet off). Flip moist unit back into boxers. Flush. Step to the sink. Begin the Pilate.
Gaze wanders to the veiled medicine chest six inches from the tip of my nose. Old flannel shirt tacked to the frame. Be easy to lift a tail, peek under…
Hustle out of the bathroom, hands thickly lathered in Dr. Bronner’s mint soap. Out in the kitchen yank open fridge. Build another BM – hold the V-8, forget the stalk, fuck the glass. Straight out of the quart gulp. Slam bottle down on counter. Watch a moment suds slide over red letters: P-O-P-O-V…
Relocate with half-empty into media room. Flop on couch. Snatch cigar box from lowest of built-in shelves. Pop open Phillies Cheroot lid. Remove a fresh outfit. Rip syringe from plastic wrapper. Flushed with chugged vodka, sweat beading forehead, jab needle into elbow crook. Miss. Fish. Vein rolls. Rolls again. Finally hit. But point slips out…
Forgot to tie off. Flip hypo over shoulder. Ticks off wall. Bounces behind couch. Raise arm. Steady elbow in right palm. Jam mouth down. Chomp fleshy hollow.
Skin breaks like lightning. Pain thunders. Blood flows.
I suck. Slurp. Lick. Blindly seize – blood coursing down chin, spattering slacks, barefeet, leprous wall-to-wall shag – neck of quart in right fist. Chase mouthful of hot blood with eighty proof cheapshit.
Eyes flick to, as sink into spongy couch, dead plasma screen. In which I detect the room mutely mirrored: the draped window, the empty – now the cigar box removed – shelves, the arm of the couch, the…
Jerk back down for a another chomp at throbbing gory crook. Lightning repeats, bone-splitting thunder re-peals. Eyes squint. Suck another couple ounces of the scarlet.
Tip the bottle – now – to my disgust – wholly unfull. In the curved glass – for background the back of the label – catch reflected…
I just can’t see myself…
Hurl bottle eight feet across the room. Crashes through monitor in internecine holocaust.
“Cut!” bawls the director. “It’s a wrap!”
I hurtle through the bedroom into the bathroom, vomiting on the way bloody Popov. Slam shut door. Strip off soiled slacks, BVDs, boxers. Change into a bat. Before the script comes after me in unplain English with a cricket bat.
A black widow chuckles. The dust mites purloin the widow’s mite. And I recall – on my knees heaving through my reflection in the bowl – the director to be some indirect offspring of Houston. Despite his name appearing as Alfredo Bitchcock in the credits to this bestiality flick STRANGERS ON A TURKEY – all of the above thereof but one of a thousand and one scenes.
“I think,” I spit bile into faceless water, “we have a solution, Houston.”

Willie Smith

The romance of suffocating in a bedsit of mould-dappled books—piled high under your bed, under it, scattered over it—as far as I’m concerned is about as romantic as going to Butlins for your honeymoon—acceptable in the days of Jimmy Tarbuck perhaps, but surely not when you’ve the option of flying to Naples for little more than it costs to buy enough booze to find a red coat entertaining.

‘Dear girl,’ says the naysayer with tilted head and knotted brow, ‘aren’t you missing the point? It’s the experience of reading a physical book that I’m worried about, I’m quite anxious that it shouldn’t be lost forever’. Honest, I understand—it’s the smell, the weight in your hands, the feel of the paper between your forefinger and thumb—but reading an eBook is an experience too, just a different one, one you might quite enjoy if you were backpacking for two months or had a closet for a home.

You could even say that eBooks are a return to the roots of storytelling, to the height of the oral tradition when the story reigned, when it didn’t matter who told it; a good one could outlive generations, it could stretch over epochs and millennia, it wasn’t about the quality of the binding or the campaign behind it.

The eBook is already doing for literature what YouTube did for filmmaking, opening the field to new talents that might have been overlooked by play-it-safe publishing giants—successes include Amanda Hocking and Karen McQuestion, and there will be many more to come, you can count on it.

Having said all this, I must confess I don’t have a Kindle, and nor do have a Kobo or an Aluratek. I am far too busy suffocating under a heap of mould-dappled books.

Alexa Vargas

Iceberg is a timeless, illustrated tale of adventure and discovery made unforgettable by Paul Kavanagh’s incisive vision and punchy humour.

Don and Phoebe live in a grim Northern town in England where they have nothing except disappointment and a terrified dog. Until they win an iceberg. Join them on their escape from normality across Europe, Africa and Antarctica, searching for a home, a heaven and a kaleidoscope.

Graham Allison

Needless to say, all our books are available on Kindle for the pocket-friendly price of $1.99. That’s right, cheaper than a pint and probably cheaper than bus fare in London and who needs buses, eh? Do the sensible thing – stay home and read a Kindle eBook instead.

Ryder Collins – Homegirl!
US | UK | Germany | France

Bogdan Tiganov – The Wooden Tongue Speaks
US | UK | Germany | France

Linda Ann Strang – Wedding Underwear for Mermaids
US | UK | Germany | France

Paul Kavanagh – The Killing of a Bank Manager
US | UK | Germany | France

Jéanpaul Ferro – Jazz
US | UK | Germany | France

We had our own private countdown on the pier, which we realised was somewhat premature when the fireworks and the cheering in the pubs behind us kicked-off two or three minutes after we popped the champagne cork. But anyway, celebrating New Year twice only consolidated my two New Year resolutions: to clean my windows more often than never, and to think before I graze. Before you presume to assume, the latter has nothing to do with dieting and everything to do with toxicology. See, last October, a jar of nutmeg called to me from my spice rack; I grated two kernels into my porridge and suffered three days of hallucinations and vomiting. And that’s why I laid off the eggnog this Christmas.

And so, my friends and I celebrated New Year 2012 right there on that little pier. We made our respective resolutions and sang a garbled Auld Lang Syne, and we did it all twice.

We each had our reasons—family dinners the next day, recovery from a cold, a long journey back—we all had our reasons, and so, before the fireworks were dead in the sky, we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways.

On the bus home alone, with my relative sobriety and my resolutions, I decided I wouldn’t have minded spending my NY at some painfully cool warehouse party in Hackney Wick, full of red-eyed revelers snorting lines from mirrors and pushing feel-good gravel up their noses, temporary couples fucking in the stairwell, on the sofa, under the kitchen table.

Alexa Vargas