Peninsula Press

Two of our very best come together to talk about Aea’s one-of-a-kind, original, funny, dark, and fun novel. Well done @aeavvw and @presspeninsula . Jeez, it’s a damn fine book. @zoeguttenplan is of course one of London’s best minds and writers, and wields both pen and typographic instrument with daring, panache, thought, and style. God, she’s brilliant! It is gonna be such a good and fun event and the red-plush bar feels spot-on for the book. You’ll get it when you get there. Very limited tickets for this one, so get your hands on one sharpish. Ticket comes with a copy of the book. It’s a whole big night so stick around, get your book signed, and party with us. Really excited for this. A damn fine book to celebrate. Ticket link in bio. Flyer by Zoe.

HUGE congratulations to Aea Varfis-van Warmelo (@aeavvw ) on the publication of her debut book Attention-Seeking Behaviourr 📕 Funny, sexy, and politically astute, Attention-Seeking Behaviour is at once a personal confessional and a critical history of lie detection methods. Blending fiction and non-fiction – memoir, novel and essay – it wields confession shamelessly while positively embracing the proximity of literature and lying. Published by @presspeninsula ✨ “Sexy, frightening, immaculately written and mercilessly perceptive. I loved every page.” - @luukekennnard “It renewed what I now hope to find in the contemporary novel altogether.” - @evediariden “At once a faultless expression of emotional truth and a work of heart-breaking precision and quality.” - @benjamin.pester “A bold and exciting novel for the weary world of today.” - @johnpamchugh “I can’t think of a recent work that more clearly demonstrates that through literature we can lie to tell the truth.” - @itsamule “I may well be a liar, but this is compulsory reading.” - @kimberly.campanello “Left me raw, exposed, blinking, unsteady on my feet, totally thrilled.” - @vida_adamczewski “Very skilfully written. A frighteningly bizarre love story for our dark times.” - @saraofthebaumes

Attention-Seeking Behaviour by Aea Varfis-van Warmelo ❣️ ‘Sexy, frightening, immaculately written and mercilessly perceptive. It’s also the most exacting, eviscerating self-critique since St Augustine. Left me with a deeper understanding of myself that I sort of wish I didn’t have. I loved every page.’ Luke Kennard Published 7 May Cover @lookbird

Huge congratulations to Max Lury on the publication of his debut novel No Ghosts! 👻 We had a brilliant time at the launch event last night, hosted by @burleyfisher and chaired by @benjamin.pester . No Ghosts is a startling debut which plumbs the undercurrents of feeling that pool beneath our use of emergent technologies, asking what new forms haunting might take. “No Ghosts is not only incisive but prescient on our increasing immersion in an unstable, tech-augmented reality. An unmissable debut.” – @luukekennnard “It’s rare to encounter a novel as wholly original and moving as No Ghosts, an uncanny venture into a world slightly tilted.” – @sophmackintosh “A hauntological ode to friendship, to the objects and hyperobjects of our world, to memory and the thrill of being. It’s utterly compelling.” – Danny Denton “No Ghosts is a novel so contemporary that it borders on prescience.” –@iameeadams OUT NOW from legends @presspeninsula ! 👻

To celebrate the publication of their new books from @presspeninsula , So Mayer (BAD LANGUAGE) and Sarah Schulman (THE FANTASY AND NECESSITY OF SOLIDARITY) will be discussing how power structures the ways in which we communicate with one another. Tickets available at the link in our bio.

On Saturday 21st February join So Mayer and Adam Zmith @adam.zmith for an insightful conversation about So’s new book Bad Language, a memoir and manifesto on language and power 💙📚🔥🗣️ 🗣️ How do we forge solidarity when language is used against us? 🗣️ What kinds of queer resistance and rage might help us find new words and ways of speaking and listening? Examining the semantic traps of their multi-lingual childhood – and taking in texts from the Torah to Grimms’ Fairytales, from protest bust cards to the works of Ursula K. Le Guin – Mayer asks who gets to speak, and who is forced into silence. Bad Language calls out the harm that words can do, while searching for crafty ways through which we can collectively reclaim language for protest and pleasure. ✨ SO MAYER is a writer, editor, bookseller and organiser. Truth & Dare, their first collection of speculative fiction, was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness and Edge Hill Short Story prizes. With Sarah Shin, they co-edited Ursula K. Le Guin, Space Crone, winner of the 2024 Locus Award for non-fiction. Bad Language is their second book for Peninsula, after A Nazi Word for a Nazi Thing. ✨ Published by @penisulapress 📖 💥 Ticket link in our bio! 💥 #thecommonpress #somayer #badlanguage #penisulapress

🔴 Attention-Seeking Behaviour 🔴 ‘I have never told anyone about this before. There is no way to prove that it happened, but why would I lie?’ The narrator of Attention-Seeking Behaviour thinks you should know about the body she found in the park. She thinks you should know about her sex life, which is fulfilling and systematic. She thinks you should know that she is a writer, that she is ‘complex, creative and nasty’. But above all, she thinks you should know that she is a compulsive liar. Trying to break this habit for the sake of Normal Ben, an honest and uncomplicated man, she attempts a sincere reckoning with her long history of deception, its psychological roots and the terrible cost it has exacted on her relationships. But can we believe a word she says? Funny, sexy, and politically astute, Attention-Seeking Behaviour is at once a personal confessional and a critical history of lie detection methods. Blending fiction and non-fiction – memoir, novel and essay – it wields confession shamelessly while positively embracing the proximity of literature and lying. ‘The most exacting, eviscerating self-critique since St Augustine. Left me with a deeper understanding of myself that I sort of wish I didn’t have. I loved every page.’ Luke Kennard ‘A novel which is both amazingly playful and deeply serious; warm and destabilising, intellectually rigorous and aesthetically stylish.’ Harriet Armstrong ‘I can’t think of a recent work that more clearly demonstrates that through literature we can lie to tell the truth.’ Oluwaseun Olayiwola ‘Nimble, rigorous and almost indecently entertaining.’ Matt Greene ‘Tricksy is high praise for this compelling debut.’ Rose Cleary ‘A truly funny, slippery and daring book that is suffused with enviable sentences, a sense of nowness, and this cynical intelligence that is a joy to interact with.’ John Patrick McHugh AEA VARFIS-VAN WARMELO is a writer and poet, and an editor at Granta magazine. Her debut poetry pamphlet Intellectual Property was published by Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art (2024). Publishes 7 May Cover design @lookbird For review enquires, please contact Ned at FMcM on: @fmcmassociates

Another cover reveal, this time for Max Lury’s brilliant, unnerving debut No Ghosts, publishing April 🔵 Kieran and Harlow’s best friend Annie disappeared a year ago. And now, so have the ghosts. After being reunited at Annie’s memorial, Kieran and Harlow begin separate searches for their lost friend, all while trying to repair their friendship. Harlow, recently retired from the CGI company she helped found, discovers fragments of the dead – faces, gestures, glances – in AI generated videos; meanwhile Kieran, aimless and isolated, stumbles into an occult community of those dedicated to finding the missing ghosts. The friends’ journeys will lead them through a world at once recognisable and strangely removed. A subterranean world of endless tunnels filled with ominous arrangements of consumer goods; a world of seances where attendees are haunted by the empty spaces where ghosts used to be. As Harlow and Kieran are drawn deeper into the circumstances behind Annie’s – and the ghosts’ – disappearance, a terrifying, singular pattern breaks the surface. No Ghosts is a startling debut which plumbs the undercurrents of feeling that pool beneath our use of emergent technologies, to ask what new forms haunting might take. Told with a sinister precision, it dramatises the abstraction and unreality that increasingly define our everyday lives, and marks the arrival of a major new literary novelist. ‘In Max Lury’s No Ghosts, astringent comic realism is twinned with an eerie plot about Big Tech’s power to reframe death.‘ Anthony Cummins, New Statesman, ’The best fiction to read this year’ ‘What makes this a really great novel is Lury’s astute social observations – his flawless ear for dialogue and radar for subtext that really nail a generational zeitgeist and the conditions it exists within. And how it seeps into work, love, death and memorial. His prose somehow manages to be coolly detached and precise while also being full of soul – and it’s a defiant, resilient kind of soul, however damaged and embattled. An unmissable debut.’ Luke Kennard Cover design @_tometherington For review enquires, please contact Ned at FMcM on: @fmcmassociates

Excited to share the cover for The History of the Vertebrate by Mar García Puig (translated by Mara Faye Lethem), publishing this April and now available for preorder 🟠 ‘On 20 December 2015 I became a mother and I went mad.’ On a single day, Mar García Puig gives birth to twins and becomes elected to the Spanish Parliament as a member of the insurgent left-wing party Podemos. What might have been the best day of her life becomes the start of a terrifying ordeal; García Puig’s grip on reality begins to slip as she grapples with uncertainty, the weight of expectation, and misogyny in both of her new roles. In defiance of a culture that tells her the problem lies within, García Puig chooses to look outwards, examining the imbrication of madness and motherhood across centuries of science, myth, and politics while dissecting the ways in which women have been pathologized and banished from public life. At once intimate and epic, The History of the Vertebrate is a searing account of postpartum madness. Moving between memory, culture, and the history of medicine, García Puig transforms her experience into a story about the countless women who have felt that sanity was leaving them, and about the patriarchal forces that have silenced them. ‘Nothing sentimental creeps into this portrait of motherhood. García Puig writes from within anxiety, grief, obsession, and psychic terror – the states that churn when new life arrives and refuses reassurance. She exposes how women have long been venerated and blamed in the same breath. Leaning into madness as much as clarity, García Puig carries with her the mothers who came before – Hecuba, Medea, Isabella Thackeray, the unnamed women punished for loving too much or too poorly. This is a breathtaking, ferocious book about maternal responsibility.’ Jamieson Webster

Published today in @literaryhub , a conversation giving greater context to the open letter published in October. Link in our bio. Thank you to @__l__m___ for all her work on this, and follow @small_press_futures for further updates on creating a sustainable future for independent publishing! @tiltedaxisbooks @prototypepubs @cipher_press

We LOVE @emilylabarge and @tillwhentillman 🧡💜 @presspeninsula

Over the last few months, we have been meeting weekly with @prototypepubs , @cipher_press and @tiltedaxisbooks to talk about the mounting challenges facing small press publishers in the UK. It's been a source of huge solace and solidarity to talk through these things together, and the result has been this open letter. We want to think through how we can work together to create a sustainable future for small press publishing, so alongside the letter outlining the challenges we are inviting people from around the industry to come together to talk about solutions. The letter is published in full on the @_thebookseller (link in bio, paywall free) and there is link to sign up to the roundtable. Thank you to Jack, Jess and Kris and all the other presses who have added their thoughts and their signatures. Let's work together to keep this thing going!