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. They are curators, risk-takers and quiet archivists...
Read more...
Deep Reads
I first fell in love with restored annotations the way many of us fall in love...
Reading Guides
I still remember the small thrill of picking up a paperback with a cover I...
Reading Guides
I found the paperback by accident — wedged spine-out between a gardening...
Reviews
I’m often asked which small-press imprints are worth subscribing to—whether...
I found the paperback by accident — wedged spine-out between a gardening manual and a book on urban planning, its stickered price peeking like a small, mischievous flag. It was mis-shelved, the kind of discovery that makes a bookseller’s heart...
I’m often asked which small-press imprints are worth subscribing to—whether you mean a literal subscription that lands a book through your letterbox, a membership that unlocks special editions and pre-orders, or simply following a press so...
I still remember the first time an annotated edition made me see a book I thought I knew in an entirely different light. I had picked up a battered novel from a secondhand stall because it kept surfacing in the margins of other books — an author...
I love the peculiar thrill of finding a paperback in a charity shop that seems to whisper, “take me.” It might be a spine cracked at the wrong place, a dog-eared cover, or simply an author’s name I only half-remember. What I really love is how...
When I first began comparing translations as part of my work at Storyscoutes Co, I assumed differences would be obvious: one translation more literal, the other more fluent. What surprised me was how often the most revealing distinctions lived in...
I once found a slim paperback wedged between gardening manuals and a stack of local history at a tiny bookshop on a rainy Wednesday. Its spine was creased in a very particular way that suggested someone had loved it and then left it. The cover was...
I have always loved the small, delicious friction that happens when two books—separated by time, geography or reputation—begin to argue with each other on the page. Pairing an overlooked novel with a contemporary reply is one of my favourite...
I first encountered a mid-century novel that had been quietly collecting dust on a secondhand shelf—its jacket browned at the edges, its spine a practiced bow from previous hands. The book was not unknown, merely neglected, sidestepped by later...
Interviewing a translator is one of the quiet pleasures of literary work: you pull back the curtain on decisions most readers never see, and you learn how meaning migrates between languages. Over the years I’ve interviewed translators for...
It begins, often, with a fragment: a single sheet of paper, a smudged date in the corner, a sentence that looks ordinary until you realise it reframes everything you thought the novel meant. I remember the first time I felt that jolt. I was alone in...