Big Issue Feature & Review, 27 October 2003 271003
This piece featured in The Big Issue (UK) magazine on the 27 October 2003.
Net Benefit
Flashback. A penniless would-be journalist (that would be me) writes a scathing indictment of the effect of selling books over the internet on struggling independent bookstores. No one reads it. The present. Same journalist reviews new ethical publishing company, Flame Books. Their aim? Establishing an author reader relationship via the internet, effectively eliminating the middleman. They also support new writers, offering fair contracts and high royalties by selling their books exclusively on their website, funding a number of creative projects through their sales. Commendable, but what about the books?
The Week You Weren’t Here by Charles Blackstone puts a slightly unsettling spin on the chick lit dating yarn, taking the reader inside the mind of aspiring writer and self proclaimed intellectual Hunter Flanagan, whose constant inner nit picking on all aspects of his life and relationships ends up betraying his own insecurities and shortcomings. His never ending analysis of the merits and, more often than not, the intellectual and social deficiencies as he sees them in the girls in his life, both past and present, reveal Hunter to be contradictory yet uncomfortably recognisable.
Morgan Jones Jones, the protagonist of Liza Granville’s Curing the Pig, wants to write a blockbuster about women. Retiring to his parents’ farm in Wales he becomes the master of all he surveys. The fact that this happens to include a vast quantity of hugely potent homemade wine, some five star hallucinogenic fungi and a hyperactive pig all combine to make this a massively addictive and surreal black comedy.
So maybe the internet isn’t all bad. Just don’t forget the bookshops.
www.flamebooks.com
JONATHAN GRAY
©The Big Issue
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