THINK BIG THURSDAY…
Every Thursday we’re gonna be highlighting a couple of our brilliant Rough Trade Editions that are included in our THINK BIG, READ SMALL collection to celebrate 2026’s National Year of Reading…
Here’s 2 London-based pamphlets that everyone should read…
Rough Trade Edition no. 33 - Without Seeming to Care at All by Max Sydney Smith
Set in an East London bar at the frontier point of gentrification—a cast of aspiring actors, writers, artists, DJs, tattooists and ‘whatever elses’ work and drink and build a strange kind of family life in ‘the bar’…
Rough Trade Edition no. 42 - Acme Attractions by Don Letts and Jeannette Lee
The story of the shop at the heart of it all—ACME ATTRACTIONS on Kings Road—one of the loci of the cultural revolution that was punk rock—and of the people who made it what it was…
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@maxsydneysmith@roughtraderecords@jeannettelee@lettsdon
It is hard to say anything about Piranesi by Susanna Clarke without interfering with it's wonderful strangeness.
From the first page we are swept into the book's otherworldly language, full of Vestibules, Moons and Tides. The voice is earnest and particular. But the where, what, how and why of this world is a puzzle that is only unlocked as the novel progresses.
A surreal and magical book, Piranesi kept me up reading well past my bedtime with an excitement and sense of wonder that took me back to being 14 or so, when books could be totally captivating and transporting in a way that they less often are now.
I did not expect to like this book. Six astronauts stuck on a spacecraft asking the big questions. No thank you, I thought. But I picked it up all the same because it was so slight and it was right at the front of the book shop and it won the Booker
And thank goodness I did! As I'm sure everyone else already knows, Orbital by Samantha Harvey is a glancingly beautiful short novel.
For some pages you are lulled into the surprisingly mundane routines of the six astronauts. And then abruptly Harvey takes us back into memory, a reflection on a painting, a remembered conversation with a child, a regret about something not said to a partner.
Human stuff. It is not so much what is recalled as the precision and sharpness with which it is done. Orbital is a short book, a novel in miniature. The chapters are short too at just a few pages. And yet on this tiny stage Harvey gives us entire lives - revealing them to us as rapidly as the sun appears to the astronauts from behind the Earth, abruptly filling the ship with light.
I read this crossing London on the overground listening to Brian Eno's Apollo, a combination I can thoroughly recommend. Mesmerising.
Greek Lessons by Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith and E. Yaewon) is a short novel about a man who teaches Ancient Greek and who is losing his sight and a woman who is one of his students who has lost the ability to speak.
There is a extract that well describes what the text is like: 'Makes no judgements. Ascribes no emotions. Everything appears as fragments.'
And this is indeed fiction with the elements unmixed. There is speech that is real and immediate and then speech that is purely lyrical and not how people talk at all. There are moments of extreme, animal expressions of emotion and then elsewhere a distancing numbmess. There are cuts across time, between different narrators, and between realism, dream, poetry, and essay.
At its best it is beautiful and there was a moment about two thirds in where I caught myself suddenly immersed and with a lump in the throat as the two characters - nearly - come together. But it is also a bewildering text, chaotic, emotionally sparse and hard work.
Much like Greek lessons themselves, this one is not for the faint of heart!
I read this poetry collection in the first week of January. It wasn't the cheeriest book to see in the New Year, but it does have some brilliant poems in it.
This selection spans the life's work of the Greek poet Takis Sinopoulos, who came of age in the darkest decade of modern Greek history, spanning the Metaxas dictatorship, WW2, the occupation and the horrors of the civil war. And these poems are indeed dark and horrific, full of the same obsessive motifs: stillness, desolation, amnesia, dryness, the corrosive light of the sun. There are many moving and beautiful poems here but it was the poem Elpenor that lodged in me the deepest. Give it a read.
This is a historical novel about Lavinia, the wife of Aeneas, who is briefly mentioned in the original poem by Virgil and given a whole novel to herself here.
I love Ursula le Guin, chiefly for the Earthsea Quartet, which is one of my favourite ever stories, and also for her science fiction novels. This isn't at that standard, but it's still good yarn, as the folksey characters in this reimagining of pre-Roman Italy might say.
The story begins with the ghost of a dying Virgil visiting Lavinia and we get a few chapters of somewhat self-conscious conversation between the poet and his creation, and about the nature of story telling. But once that's out the way, the story mostly pulls you into it's spell and I was completely immersed in the landscape of Mount Alba and the politicking of Lavinia's mother Amata.
Read this if you're looking for more Le Guin to read and you like the Romans. If you haven't read any Le Guin - read the Earthsea Quartet!
The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter is a beautiful little book. In a series of vignettes, Porter takes us into the unravelling mind of the dying painter. If you love Francis Bacon and a sharp line break, you will love this.
The Employees by Olga Ravn is a brilliant, mad and entirely original short novel.
The form consists of 179 short interviews conducted on board a space ship with its human and humanoid employees.
The ostensible purpose of the interviews are to establish the impact of the installation of a series of 'objects' on employee productivity.
We learn how the employees obsess over the objects, are comforted and disturbed by them, how they dream about them and sometimes, unable to sleep, they go to them in the middle of the night and sit with them.
Everything in this novel is told somewhat obliquely: what are these objects? has there been a murder? has there been a mutiny? who kissed the Third Officer.
All the while, the tensions onboard ratchet up, between the human and humanoid employees, between the increasingly desperate interviewees and the committee of interviewers sent by the Company.
It is by turns disturbing, surreal, funny, thought provoking and strangely gripping. Burn your business fables ! Read this instead.
The Parable of the Sower by Octavia E Butler was published in 1993 and depicts a dystopian America in 2024.
In this America, water is scarce, armed lawless bands roam the country and American liberal politics and wealth are rapidly regressing. The rich live in gated communities and the working poor defend their homes with guns.
The story is built from the journal entries of Lauren, a fifteen year old black girl, who is forced to leave her walled community and strike out across America in search of a new life.
Told in clear, direct prose, this is a gripping survivalist story, peppered with brutally violent scenes. It is not always an easy read - but it is an excellent one.
I sent @max__eru a few pics of my Halflings and he knocked up this illustration. I'll get no prizes for my mini painting skills but the prints are LUSH.
Available as a limited edition bundle with my novella 'I, Nerd' about tabletop wargaming, released 24 Feb with @open_pen . Order from OPENPEN.SHOP
