prototype publishing

Hell of Solitude: Selected Writings of Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, translated by Ryan Choi, publishes today. Featuring a foreword by Polly Barton @pollybukuro , the collection is a perfect introduction to the writing of one of the central figures of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Bringing together fiction, poetry, and philosophical prose – much of it appearing in English for the first time – Hell of Solitude showcases the range and intensity of Akutagawa’s imagination. Moving from the whimsical and fantastical to the grave and introspective, the pieces reveal a writer of extraordinary clarity and psychological depth. Interwoven throughout are poems from a prolific body of verse, examples of which are sparse in English. Translated with sensitivity and precision by Ryan Choi, Hell of Solitude offers a vital reintroduction to a writer whose lucidity, irony, and existential unease continue to resonate across cultures and generations. Polly Barton’s foreword questions why it is that Akutagawa’s work isn’t better known among anglophone readers, and celebrates his ambivalent relationship with the traditional practice of story-telling: ‘Perhaps what we have, when we are given less of a story than might be expected, when we have an unstorylike story or a desolate poem, is more of ourselves. We have things as they are, our selves as they are, and life as it is, and sometimes that is hell. Nevertheless, Akutagawa shows us that sharing that hell with others can be electric.’ With thanks to @englishpen_ and @aceagrams

Happiness, Yuri Felsen’s haunting follow-up to Deceit, and the second novel in his Proustian cycle The Recurrence of Things Past – a landmark of Russian émigré fiction – publishes today. Influenced by the great modernists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Yuri Felsen’s writing stood at the forefront of aesthetic and philosophical currents in European literature. Set among the exiled Russian community of interwar Paris, Happiness offers both a vivid social snapshot and an unnerving psychological portrait, and its exploration of desire, rivalry, masculinity and self-deception, shaped by shifting sexual and emotional mores, feels strikingly modern. Written as a diary addressed to his beloved Lyolya, Happiness unfolds as an intense stream of consciousness in which Volodya – its anxious, self-scrutinising narrator – revisits the fragile equilibrium of their difficult relationship. When new figures enter Lyolya’s orbit, Volodya’s hard-won certainties begin to collapse. Forced to contend with a series of rivals – a Soviet film star, a dashing ex-soldier, a wealthy businessman – he is driven ever deeper into jealousy and self-analysis, with tragic results. As the relationship fractures, Volodya probes the uneasy bond between emotional suffering and artistic creation, and the elusive nature of happiness itself. Felsen’s writing has only recently been rediscovered. At the height of his career, following the Nazi occupation of France, he was deported and killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and his legacy and archive were largely destroyed by the Nazis. The translations by Bryan Karetnyk of the earlier Deceit, and now Happiness, mark the first time Felsen’s work has been made available to English-language readers. It was a pleasure to launch the book on Tuesday evening at Pushkin House in London, where we also launched Deceit four years ago. Matthew Janney chaired a fascinating conversation between Bryan and Maria Rubins, discussing Felsen’s life and Russian émigré society in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s, situating Felsen’s work in this cultural milieu, and making a compelling case for his literary and historical relevance today.

Over the past few months, I’ve been meeting every week with a group of fellow indie publishers to share our concerns about the precarity of the current situation we all find ourselves in. The sense of community and solidarity has been wonderful and vital, and together we have written an open letter, signed by more than 20 other presses, to both raise awareness of the situation and open the possibility of a dialogue about how things might change to allow for a more sustainable future, and to make a case for why that future matters. Thank you @krisvidaalfaro @tiltedaxisbooks , @samcaradog @presspeninsula and @jacked_now @cipher_press , and to everyone who has so far supported the letter. The full letter has been published by The Bookseller today, along with a separate news story, both of which you can read via the link in our bio.

Proof copies of Lamento by @madame.nielsen , translated by Gaye Kynoch, have arrived! Winner of an @englishpen_ Translates award, publishing on 9 July. ‘Love doesn’t have a language; it’s an animal, it’s theatre of cruelty, it’s borderline madness, it’s the sublime and is incapable of articulation. It’s only long afterwards, once all hope is at an end and the two of you in a sense no longer exist, once you are dead, that it can be told.’ Lamento is a love story that questions the possibility of reconciling the magic of infatuation with everyday life. The story begins with a fire – an image which permeates the novel. The narrator, a writer, meets a theatre artist; their love feels ecstatic and utopian, completely untouched by the outside world. With the birth of a child, the weight of the everyday turns their passion destructive. The woman fights for every minute she can to write, while the man abandons family life to focus on his art. Their private drama is further confronted by the jagged realities of colonialism and injustice, forcing them to see themselves as part of a violent history they cannot escape. As love turns to hate, we follow their restless search to understand the enigma of love. In a startling act of reverse auto-fiction, Madame Nielsen – a legendary figure of the Danish avant-garde – inhabits the voice of the woman she once loved to interrogate the man she once was. The result is an unsparing reconciliation of gender and memory, a lament that strips away self-pity to expose the narcissistic cost of creative obsession, and a meditation on how gender alters our experience of the world. If you are a reviewer or bookseller and would like a copy, send us a DM!

Many congratulations to Caleb Klaces, whose second novel, Mr Outside, has been shortlisted for the @thesocietyofauthors Encore Award for Best Second Novel of the Year. This year’s judges were @malika.booker , Rachel Aroesti @rachel_aroesti and @anitasethi who selected a ‘treasure trove’ of 4 novels for their shortlist: > Love Forms by Claire Adam (Faber) > Mr Outside by Caleb Klaces (Prototype) > Sycorax by Nydia Hetherington (Quercus) > The Wilder Path by Deborah Tomkins (Aurora Metro Books) The judges said of the book: 'Mr Outside takes place over only three days during lockdown, yet manages to skilfully unfold lifetimes as the narrator helps to pack up the house of his father, Thomas, who has dementia and is imminently moving into a care home. The act of packing up a life proves fertile material: packing up paradoxically leads to the re-opening of memories and old wounds, and re-assessing, before closure becomes truly possible. The challenging relationship between father and son is at the novel’s core and the battlefield of memory is movingly explored – to what extent are our memories accurate? How does emotion shape memory? The author is also a poet and excels in lyrical depictions of the ordinary objects that make up a life and the extraordinary stories they have to tell. The novel is by turns heartbreaking and humorous as it explores what it really means to care for another human being.'

Edinburgh friends! On Thursday 30 April, translator Bryan Karetnyk will be in conversation with Sarah Gear at the wonderful @goldenharebooks about Yuri Felsen, his novels Happiness and Deceit, and Russian modernist émigré writing. Tickets via link in bio. Happiness, which published last month, is the second part of Felsen’s The Recurrence of Things Past trilogy. Both subtle and profound in its exploration of love, art, literature, and human frailty, Felsen’s trilogy traces the tormented romance of its protagonist alongside his artistic evolution, standing at the forefront of aesthetic and philosophical currents in European modernism. Yuri Felsen was the pseudonym of Nikolai Freudenstein. Born in St Petersburg in 1894, he emigrated in the wake of the Russian Revolution, first to Riga and then to Berlin, before finally settling in Paris in 1923. In France, he became one of the leading writers of his generation, alongside the likes of Vladimir Nabokov; influenced by the great modernists such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, his writing stood at the forefront of aesthetic and philosophical currents in European literature. Following the German occupation of France at the height of his career, Felsen tried to escape to Switzerland; however, he was caught, arrested and interned in Drancy concentration camp. He was deported in 1943 and killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Up on Tenement’s REHEARSAL today, the title story as excerpted from the forthcoming Prototype publication of HELL OF SOLITUDE, out & in the world 16.04.26, a survey of selected prose works from Ryūnosuke Akutagawa translated & collated by Ryan Choi. * “The surfaces of these texts crackle with the charge of Akutagawa’s inimitable mind. Choi’s translations are a revelation.” Stephen Mortland (@stephenmortland ) * Order now via Prototype direct, & roll by Rehearsal ℅ the link in our bio. * (@prototypepubs ) * “As with all the most masterful compilations, one senses [in HELL OF SOLITUDE] an organising principle that is at once definite & diffuse, a kind of atmospheric coherence that evades easy explication. [...] Mulling over the attitude to narrative showcased in this collection, I keep coming back to a dispute that Akutagawa had in the final year of his life with Jun’ichirō Tanizaki about whether plot was the most important aspect in fiction. This culminated in an essay that Akutagawa published in the literary journal Kaizō in praise of writers of ‘unstorylike stories,’ which he held to be the purest kind of fiction. It seems to me in this collection we have not just a compendium of ‘unstorylike stories’ but the comprehensive exposition of an unstorylike stance towards story & storytelling. [...] The question then is, what does matter? What do we have when we do not have a story? [...] The truly astonishing thing, which one feels the unstorylike stories making up Hell of Solitude whispering to us, is that we see apples, or animals, or the intricacies of human relationships as commonplace, & do not find them astonishing. What is astonishing is that we are alive, in this world, with other people thinking & feeling similar things to us, & sometimes we come close to forgetting that. But sometimes, when a crack opens in our desensitisation in the form of a painting or a story, we can remember...” Polly Barton (@pollybukuro ), from her foreword to this edition. *

Free Verse Poetry Book and Magazine Fair, celebrating the vitality of poetry in the UK, returns on Saturday 25 April, and we will be there. It’s an unrivalled opportunity to browse and buy the very best in contemporary poetry, and to meet publishers, organisations and poets.   The fair takes place on Saturday 25 April 2026 in the Lower Hall of St Columba’s Church, Pont Street, London, SW1X 0BD.  The main exhibition space is open from 12.00 noon – 6.30 pm, with a quiet hour from 11.00 am. After the fair, all visitors are welcome to join a free gala reading with bar from 7pm.

This Saturday we'll be at The Indie Press Fair, part of The Alternative Book Fair, a week of publishing and author events to bring the world of publishing and literature to a wider audience. We'll be selling our books, and there are excellent panel events throughout the day, all of which are free to attend. Please come and say hi! > Saturday 11 April > 10am-5pm > Islington Central Library, 2 Fieldway Crescent, London N5 1PF @indiepressnetwork @indienovellapublishing @inpressbooks

We are excited to announce the forthcoming publication of Hell of Solitude, a bold and varied selection of writings by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, one of the central figures of twentieth-century Japanese literature. Bringing together fiction, poetry, and philosophical prose – much of it appearing in English for the first time – this collection showcases the range and intensity of Akutagawa’s imagination. Moving from the whimsical and fantastical to the grave and introspective, the pieces reveal a writer of extraordinary clarity and psychological depth. Interwoven throughout are poems from a prolific body of verse, examples of which are sparse in English, alongside ‘Art and Other Things’, a fragmentary essay in which Akutagawa expounds his aesthetic views while drawing on examples from world literature and art. Translated with sensitivity and precision by Ryan Choi, Hell of Solitude offers a vital reintroduction to a writer whose lucidity, irony, and existential unease continue to resonate across cultures and generations. The collection includes a foreword by writer and translator Polly Barton, questioning why it is that Akutagawa’s work isn’t better known among anglophone readers, and celebrating his ambivalent relationship with the traditional practice of story-telling: ‘Perhaps what we have, when we are given less of a story than might be expected, when we have an unstorylike story or a desolate poem, is more of ourselves. We have things as they are, our selves as they are, and life as it is, and sometimes that is hell. Nevertheless, Akutagawa shows us that sharing that hell with others can be electric.’ Hell of Solitude will be published on 16 April and can be pre-ordered now. With thanks to @englishpen_ and @aceagrams .

Happiness is here, and published next week! We’re so happy to be able to continue publishing these lost modernist works by Yuri Felsen, thanks to the tireless work and exceptional translations of Bryan Karetnyk. Huge thanks, too, to @englishpen_ for supporting the book. We have two launch events coming up in London and Edinburgh: @pushkinhouselondon on 10 March, with Bryan, Matthew Janney and Maria Rubins @goldenharebooks on 30 April, with Bryan and Sarah Gear. Tickets for both are available via the link in our bio, and you can order your copy of the book from us now.

From Happiness by Yuri Felsen, in Bryan Karetnyk's luminous translation. The follow-up to the acclaimed Deceit, a landmark of modernist émigré fiction. Publishing on 12 March. --------- Happiness (1932) is the second novel in Yuri Felsen’s cycle The Recurrence of Things Past. Written as a diary addressed to his beloved Lyolya, it unfolds as an intense stream of consciousness in which Volodya – its anxious, self-scrutinising narrator – revisits the fragile equilibrium of their difficult relationship. When new figures enter Lyolya’s orbit, Volodya’s hard-won certainties begin to collapse. Forced to contend with a series of rivals – a Soviet film star, a dashing ex-soldier, a wealthy businessman – he is driven ever deeper into jealousy and self-analysis, with tragic results. As the relationship fractures, Volodya probes the uneasy bond between emotional suffering and artistic creation, and the elusive nature of happiness itself. Set among the exiled Russian community of interwar Paris, Happiness offers both a vivid social snapshot and an unnerving psychological portrait. Felsen’s exploration of desire, rivalry, masculinity and self-deception, shaped by shifting sexual and emotional mores, feels strikingly modern.