Anthologies are very particular animals in the ecology of literature, which, if done right, allow for cross-pollination among readers. We are grateful to the contributors for making this one possible and we hope that it might still furnish fertile cross-pollination for future readers of the existing volumes, some of whom, we hope, might buy that volume in the month remaining before it goes out of print.

For those interested in the current or other work of the authors included, we hope the links below might provide useful starting points for further exploration. (If any of the authors wish us to change the link provided for them to something else, please do let us know.)

Reggie Oliver
Katherine Khorey
Michael Cisco
Colin Insole
Brendan Connell
Justin Isis
Yarrow Paisley
Nina Allan
Jimmy Grist
Peter Gilbert
Daniel Mills
Joe Simpson Walker
Sonia Orin Lyris
Jesse Kennedy
Paul Jessup
John Cairns
Ralph Doege
Rhys Hughes
Kristine Ong Muslim
Quentin S. Crisp
Julie Sokolow
Nick Jackson
Megan Lee Beals
D.F. Lewis
Jeremy Reed

The Dadaoism anthology is the last of the Chômu titles in print. Please note, when it goes out of distribution on the 10th of March, it is still possible that retailers will have copies of this and other titles in stock until they are bought up; there will simply be no more copies printed.

In just over ten years, we have released 28 extraordinary books, with which we are proud to be associated. We have been especially gratified to be able to put out the bubbling and provocative laboratory-mix of very different talents that makes the Chômu catalogue so dynamic, and we have been fortunate to have had so many strange treasures submitted to us to make this possible. We hope that they will not long stay out of print.

Chômu titles will be removed from distribution at the end of January (there might be separate announcements concerning the Dadaoism anthology), so you still have almost two months in which to buy up any titles that you have not so far collected.

At a later date, I hope I will have the necessary distance (and the time) to write more fully about what has been such an important part of my life. For now, let me write simply that I hope that readers, writers and others who have had anything to do with Chômu, will have fond memories. If I may, I would also like to take the opportunity to express the hope that the relatively brief activity of Chômu has helped to demonstrate that Print-on-Demand books, far from being disposable, can and do become collectable. A Print-on-Demand book is a limited edition whose limitation we don’t know until the end.

With best wishes,

Quentin S. Crisp

There are also brief personal tributes to John Elliott by Quentin S. Crisp, here and here.

An audio interview with him, conducted by Quentin S. Crisp and recorded by Joe Campbell, may be listened to and downloaded at SoundCloud here:

Chômu interview #2: John Elliott

It is a privilege today to be able to present our readers an interview with a writer who has given the world of writing something of great originality and value whilst remaining, perhaps enigmatically, a little off the radar. Please enjoy the following interview with John Elliott.

Chômu Press: There was a slight gap between your first novel (Another Example of Indulgence) and your second (Dying to Read). Are there reasons for this that you feel like sharing?

John Elliott: Slight gap is an understatement. Basically, my commitment to work and my alcohol consumption—socially that is—out of it eroded writing time. I’m also a slow writer even in the best of sessions.

CP: You are a jazz enthusiast; has this influenced your writing in any way?

JE: Yes. Along with books and the movies it has been a constant source of inspiration to me. A veritable ocean to dip into. In a purely personal way when I sit down to write—apply bum to seat as PG Wodehouse advised—I say to myself, ‘Let’s play a little bebop.’ It’s the idea of improvisation and the more remote possibility of transcendence that leads me on. Musicians talk about playing inside and outside at the same time. I translate that as creating surface but also trying to convey something below and beyond it. In other words, getting the combination of words, phrases and themes to achieve several levels.

CP: Did you have any particular impetus for writing Dying to Read?

JE: Yeah. I wanted to write something lighthearted with the aforementioned Mr Wodehouse and more especially Raymond Queneau as my guides. I’d recently read his A Harsh Winter (Un Rude Hiver) which I loved. As a youngster I consumed a lot of detection fiction so that attracted me as a background and genre. Once the characters appeared my fondness for them propelled me onwards. Making people laugh in the writing group I belong to was also a boon and a spur.

CP: What are you working on at the moment?

JE: A novel called Fake Book, which is a jazz term. It’s largely set in Glasgow at the time of the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and is a love story. I’m a sucker for lost causes.

CP: Do you have any book recommendations for our readers?

JE: I recently greatly enjoyed Pereira Maintains by Antonio Tabucchi. I’d encourage everyone to read Witold Gombrowicz, Cosmos—Pornografia—Ferdydurke. Thomas Bernhard whose mordant wit and scathing denunciations I love. His technique is brilliantly shown off in The Loser, The Lime Works and Extinction. Robert Walser, greatly admired by Kafka, is worth exploring.

Following on from the news of the Marked to Die anthology last year, we are very pleased to make another Mark Samuels-related announcement. Written in Darkness, the fifth collection of short fiction by Mark Samuels, and the twenty-eighth title from Chômu Press, is officially released today. Originally available as a limited edition hardback from Egaeus Press, it is now generally available as a Chômu paperback, with lush new cover artwork from Christopher Conn Askew and book design by David Rix.

Samuels’s fourth collection, The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales, released in paperback by Chômu in 2011, has proven exceptionally popular with our readers, and we are sure that the current collection will be enjoyed just as widely and deeply. With a further refinement of the author’s concise, elegant style and a broadening of his themes and subject matter, the nine apocalyptic tales included in Written in Darkness are testament to Samuels’s secure and growing place in the consciousness of the connoisseur as an authentic practitioner of weird fiction.

From the back cover: “Europe decays, but the Bloody Baron’s spirit will not rest. A lone yachtsman is becalmed at sea, and confronts madness, or something greater than madness. A condemned office building is besieged by the forces of transcendent decay. In the city of exiles, an unguessable secret awaits.” For all this and more, book your one-way ticket to the heart of the labyrinth here. Or, if you would first like a sample of the contents, you can listen to Quentin S. Crisp reading the final story, ‘In Eternity—Two Lines Intersect’, by arrangement with the author, at Soundcloud, here:

For further information, the author talks informally to Quentin S. Crisp about the collection, about weird fiction, psychogeography, Thomas Ligotti and many other things, in the following YouTube vlog interview:

Other stimulating news—of Chômu Press and miscellaneous matters

Although Chômu’s release schedule has slowed down recently, news abounds in relation to our authors and the surrounding small-press world. In January, for the first time, one of our titles was mentioned in the New York Times. In interview, Roxane Gay was asked, “What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?”, and replied: “I Am a Magical Teenage Princess, by Luke Geddes.” Of course, our readers can claim to have been ahead of the pack here; we hope that many more will follow their excellent lead.

On BBC Radio 2, in February, talking to Jonathan Ross about his ‘hidden treasures’, Marc Almond recited a poem by the Chômu-published poet (beloved of Björk and J.G. Ballard), Jeremy Reed. Marc Almond, of course, collaborated with Jeremy Reed for his Against Nature project, putting the seminal decadent novel by J.-K. Huysmans to music; the lyrics for that project, written by Reed, are included in the fantastic miscellany, Nothing But a Star.

The first of a three-part interview, in which artist and musician Rachel Margetts talks to Chômu author Quentin S. Crisp about the relevance of the Dao De Jing to the 21st century, has recently been uploaded to YouTube. The interview was conducted by Skype, and the image and ambient background audio are provided by Rachel Margetts.

The Cutest Girl in Class, by Quentin S. Crisp, Justin Isis and Brendan Connell, now in paperback.

The (as the name suggests) friendly press, Snuggly Books, have been very busy of late. Last month, they released in paperback the three-author collaborative novel The Cutest Girl in Class, by Quentin S. Crisp, Justin Isis and Brendan Connell (reviewed by Publishers Weekly here). Other recent releases include An Ossuary of the North Lagoon, by Frederick Rolfe a.k.a. Baron Corvo, and a collection of seasonal tanka, October, by Quentin S. Crisp.

To keep up to date with all Chômu and related news, and if you are not already signed up, please do subscribe here to our e-mail list.

As the whistles and gunpowder smell of fireworks die away and we start to approach, with premature anticipation or dread, the festive season, and as the dark winter evenings that seem to call up atavistic memories of roaming wolf packs draw in, we break a long Chômu silence to bring you news of Mark Samuels, Snuggly Books and other matters.

First we present an interview with Chômu author Justin Isis, regarding the curious and remarkable Marked to Die, an anthology of fiction in tribute to the illustrious Mark Samuels, whose collection The Man Who Collected Machen and Other Weird Tales we published in 2011. The anthology, edited by Justin Isis, was released earlier this year, from Snuggly Books, and is available from the publisher’s website and elsewhere.

Interview with Justin Isis Regarding the Mark Samuels Tribute Anthology

Chômu Press: What formed the initial impetus for the Marked to Die anthology?

Justin Isis: A vague desire to write Mark Samuels Real Person Fiction or fanfiction, resulting from a vague feeling that other people would eventually end up doing this, and I wanted to take the initiative and get there first. From there it was mostly a desire to rope other writers into this scheme and see what they’d come up with. The tribute anthology format is a pretty inherently boring and conservative one, from my perspective, and I wanted to see what interesting things I could do to somehow subvert or reinvent it while still fulfilling the basic obligation of honoring the subject material. Mark’s own writing is a model of stylistic focus and consistency, which made it weirdly ideal for this kind of thing—there were enough clear jumping-on points, and his own approach had been influential enough that I felt confident the writers I solicited would have a lot to work with. I think we succeeded in stretching the format pretty far at times through multiple layers of metafiction, random author insertions and the contributions of some writers who’d barely even read Mark’s work—balancing it all, of course, with stories from some of his oldest and closest friends who understand his style, influences and thematic concerns on a deep level.

Chômu Press: What would you say are the non-obvious aspects of that stylistic consistency that have ultimately fed into the anthology—the non-obvious jumping-on points, if you like?

Justin Isis: Mark’s writing is often compared to that of Thomas Ligotti, who’s an admitted influence, but when looked at closely, they don’t actually have that much in common—Ligotti’s stories are much more consistently unreal and vague about the details of place, for example, whereas Mark always seems to be coming to grips with London as it decays. The idea of some kind of psychogeography or deep engagement with setting (deep topography?) was one I hoped the contributors would seize on, and a fair number of them did: Thana Niveau’s ‘Language of the City,’ and David Rix’s monumental ‘Slag Glass Lachrimae,’ which is rooted firmly in the England of rising housing prices and persistent low-level despair. That kind of attention to setting gave the book a grounding it otherwise wouldn’t have had: even as it ranges pretty far over the globe with stories set in Russia, Japan, South America, etc., it still seems to keep one leg of the compass fixed in London. You could also pick up on the religious underpinnings of some of Mark’s stories, which of course have been the subject of some controversy. A few of the contributors chose to play them straight, while others engaged with them in fairly unexpected ways. There’s a pretty clear metaphysical thread running through the book.

Chômu Press: The anthology, of course, is called Marked to Die. Do you think there’s a morbid, or perhaps simply unhelpful prejudice, against living writers? This anthology is an attempt to celebrate a writer in his lifetime, but writers are often more celebrated in such a way (and in other ways) after their death; is this the inevitable result of the time investment necessary for reading books, so that it takes a while for the reading public to sift the good from the bad, or do you think it’s something else?

Justin Isis: Since the book has come out I’ve seen at least five or six comments along the lines of “Is Mark Samuels dead? No? Well, he probably should be if he has a tribute anthology.” There’s definitely a sense in which writers are only seen as real, as accepted, once they’re in the ground. But the intention of this book was never to be any kind of monument in the tombstone sense; neither do I think it comes close to capturing everything about Mark’s writing. I’m fully expecting him to keep changing and evolving, and if his recent work (such as the upcoming novel A Pilgrim Stranger) is anything to go by, the public impression of his writing might be completely different in another ten or twenty years. I mean, I did say that I expected there would be further tributes, further instances of him being used as a character, etc. Marked to Die gets things rolling, but it’s really just the beginning. More generally, I don’t think much time at all is needed to evaluate quality, it’s just that the cult of death is excessively prevalent. Look at how much revenue is being extracted from Kafka, Lovecraft and others who died poor and unknown. I’d rather focus on the living.

Further Intriguing News

The Samuels-related news does not end, however, with the release of the Marked to Die tribute anthology this year, or even with the enigmatic A Pilgrim Stranger mentioned in the interview above, for the next book to be released by Chômu Press will be the Mark Samuels collection Written in Darkness, previously released as a limited edition hardback by Egaeus Press. The author himself has become the latest of many to publish his works directly, and fans of Mark Samuels can now find his Glyphotech and Other Macabre Processes back in print and available for purchase at Amazon, soon to be followed by his short novel, The Face of Twilight.

Before we go, we would like to urge all readers who have enjoyed Chômu Press publications to take a closer look at Snuggly Books, who are publishing some of the same authors as Chômu (see, for instance, the attractive reissue of Quentin S. Crisp’s long out-of-print collection, Rule Dementia!, or the forthcoming publication of Brendan Connell’s masterly fictional life of a Paraguayan actor and star of Cinecittà, Clark), and other interesting contemporary authors most deserving of the reader’s attention. For the adventurous connoisseur, Snuggly Books are also unearthing and disseminating (sometimes in new or first translation) notable works of Decadent, Symbolist, and otherwise curious or exotic literature, such as The Tarantulas’ Parlor and Other Unkind Tales, by Léon Bloy, and The Soul-Drinker and Other Decadent Fantasies, by Jean Lorrain.

That today is the last day for entering the prize draw for an inscribed copy of Here Comes the Nice, by Jeremy Reed.

And that tomorrow, December the 1st, is the day of the book launch, for Here Comes the Nice. Doors open at 8pm and admission is £5, but this is refunded with a signed copy of the book which costs £10 (IE, you’ll save five quid on the usual price of the book). Copies of the book will be limited, of course, so this offer is first come first served, or, as they say ’subject to availability’.

The venue is Jamboree, 566 Cable Street, Limehouse, London. Jeremy Reed will be performing with The Ginger Light:

The support act is confirmed as Lord Magpie and the Prince of Cats: