I rarely approach a translation like a passive reader. When I find a neglected novel with two competing English versions, I treat the moment as a small literary excavation: which translation will unearth the author’s original rhythms, cultural textures and moral weight most effectively? Over the...
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Deep Reads
I bought the book for a pound from a charity shop on a wet Tuesday afternoon....
Reading Guides
I love the small archaeological thrills of secondhand bookshops: the smell of...
Reading Guides
When a midlist novel slips out of print notices, fades from the pages of review...
Interviews
Interviewing a small-press editor is one of the most rewarding things I do....
When a midlist novel slips out of print notices, fades from the pages of review roundups and ends up mis-shelved in used bookstores, it isn't always because it's bad. Often it's a casualty of marketing cycles, publishing trends and the attention...
Interviewing a small-press editor is one of the most rewarding things I do. These are the people who read obsessively in the margins, who argue for manuscripts that larger houses overlook, who shepherd difficult books into the world with limited...
It happens to me quite often: I want to read a foreign-language book that several translators have brought into English, and the internet is full of passionate, contradictory advice. One critic praises a new edition for its "faithful" rendering; a...
I once found a single marginal note in a seventeenth‑century pamphlet—a terse reference to a forgotten pamphleteer who'd had a brief, scandalous career and then disappeared from the bibliographies. That tiny footnote felt like a door left ajar....
When I pull a secondhand book from a shelf and find handwriting in the margins, I feel the particular kind of curiosity that made me fall in love with bookshops in the first place. Marginalia—the underlinings, exclamation marks, date-stamped...
I always come back to small presses when I want to be surprised. They are the places that publish the books I wouldn't have known to look for—the slim, stubborn voices that resist genre boxes, the translations that feel like private transmissions,...
I want to convince you of a small, delicious experiment: choose one single overlooked novel and let it reshape the way you read for months. Not a shortlist, not a genre binge, but one book chosen with curiosity and a willingness to be led. I’ve...
When I started doing author interviews and scouring the small-press landscape for Storyscoutes Co, I quickly realised that the best route to discovering an overlooked voice often runs through the people who make books happen: small-press editors....
I first fell in love with restored annotations the way many of us fall in love with marginalia: by accident. I was working through a battered copy of a neglected early-20th-century novel in a secondhand shop when a slipped page revealed pencil notes...
I still remember the small thrill of picking up a paperback with a cover I didn’t recognise, reading the back blurb, and feeling certain I’d stumbled on something quietly brilliant. Too often, though, those pleasures are complicated by...