“I hear 4-7 voices, all the time… They talk to each other, talk to me… ‘Janey’s doing this, Janey’s doing that… should she be doing that? … why don’t you do this?’ It’s very distressing, it’s very obscene… I hate it.”

Janey Antoniou is a mental health service user and freelance trainer and writer on mental health issues, and she was on Radio 4 this morning. Today’s Between Ourselves discussed schizophrenia and you can hear the highly recommended programme again (for a limited time) on the show’s site. Janey’s responses to the interviewer’s questions were, unsurprisingly, pretty heartfelt:

“Are you hearing them now?”
“Yes. I don’t want to talk about it otherwise I’ll have to start concentrating on it.”

But there is another side to the voices, one that we talk about more often in literary terms, but which becomes sidelined when we discuss mental health issues. Janey’s fellow guest, Dolly Sen, explained that “I also hear voices and I also hear them all the time. When I’m feeling depressed then the voices will be negative, but likewise when I’m feeling a bit high or a bit elated it can be actually quite beautiful to listen to my voices. I’m a writer and a poet and I do sometimes get my poetry from the voices I hear.”

Dolly’s poetic voice, as well as various other guises, can be heard on her website. She is one of a number of writers published by Chipmunka, the world’s first dedicated mental health publisher, who believe that mental health will become part of the social norm, and are doing all they can to ensure a smooth, informed transition. You can read more about Dolly, Chipmunka and the Mad Lit genre in an article by Ben Watson over at Mute magazine.

One of the unexpected highlights of last week’s London Book Fair (and believe us, any highlights are unexpected) was the British Council’s International Young Publisher of the Year Award. The Award has been running for three years now, and is intended to “celebrate the entrepreneurial and leadership ability of a young person (aged between 25 and 35), working in the publishing sector in their own country.”

Ten countries are selected each year, and are represented by a finalist each, who get a ten-day trip to the UK to meet a wide variety of people in the UK book trade, including Bloomsbury CEO Nigel ‘Google Ate My Hamster’ Newton and Canongate bigwig Jamie “I own Scotland” Byng. They then each pitch a book from their respective countries which is currently unpublished in their UK to a select crowd of knackered publishers and wannabe authors at the LBF, and the YP judged most promising goes home with a £7,500 cheque and the promise of a stand at next year’s book fair. (The competition is judged, incidentally, by an independent panel which this year including Gautam Malkani, who STML is rather regretting backing in the great hype race of 2006 - Londonstani ain’t worth it people. Sorry.)

At the pitch session STML attended, the finalists hailed from South Africa, Mexico, Colombia, Lebanon and Thailand. Flippant as we may be, STML found the YP’s presentations both inspiring and slightly frightening (”They’re younger than us!” “Only physically”). There was also a palpable yearning in the audience to be involved in the exciting breaking of new ground that the finalists spoke of, a far cry from the conservative, over-saturated and stagnant book world represented in the rest of the building.

Michelle Matthews, at only 27, is the Publishing Manager of Oshun Books, an imprint of the grand Struik Publishers. Michelle developed and launched the imprint herself in 2004 and has since published a range of books by and for South African women, the first publisher to do so in SA. Check out the 180° collection for what’s hot in South African writing right now.

The multitalented (and, if we may be so crude, rather hot) Alejandro Cruz is the Editor and Director of Hoja por Hoja (Page by Page), the only Mexican publication devoted to current publishing issues. Their fascinating English-language edition produced especially for the LBS contained essays such as “Blooms of a Different Song: Novelties, Brilliance and Lies in Mexican Poetry” and “Pro Wrestlers and Strippers: Books on Art and Photography in Mexico.” Not since 3am at the Razz Club, Barcelona, Summer 2001, has STML been so annoyed we don’t speak Spanish. Alejandro was pitching Hipotermia (Hypothermia) by Álvaro Enrique, a novel in 20 short stories wherein the writer and the writing feature variously “as a man, a father, a voice, a plot, as a horizon, a scheme, a reality.” Published in Spanish by Anagrama-Colofón and recently acquired by Gallimard for the French, English rights should not be (but probably are) far behind. If anyone knows a good translator who’ll work for proofs, please get in touch.

Other pitchers included Carlos Castillo, Literature Editor of Colombia’s increasingly fiction-publishing Editorial Norma, Pharekaew Kaewka, representing Baan Lae Suan Books, the place to go if you want the skinny on Thai interior design, Qasim Al Belushi of Oman heritage press, the Beit Al Zubar Foundation, and the eventual winner, Joanna El Mir, the passionate Creative Director of Lebanese children’s publisher Samir Editeur.

Used to a UK industry in which young and independent publishers are routinely ignored, marginalised and underpaid (OK, we’ll stop now), it was refreshing to see such a group listened to, lauded and rewarded. That the event was entirely set up and run by the British Council, to which organisation all the finalists were clearly extremely grateful, can only serve to bolster the UK’s reputation overseas. This is in stark contrast to the home industry’s habitual blindness to nearly everything that happens outside the boundaries of the Englsih language, but perhaps someone will be brave enough to take one of these publishers up on their offer…

As you’ve surely noticed by now, STML is rather fond of Metronome Press, the English-language publisher set up in Paris by Clémentine Deliss, and not just because they shamelessly chucked a couple of free books our way. No, we like them because they promote their books unequivocally as art, a rare thing in fiction these days. That they don’t have to rely on the whims of the booksellers and the great unwashed to survive in these hard times is paraded in the list of patrons at the back of each edition, much to the chagrin of others.

Even the great Pete Ayrton himself, founder of Serpent’s Tail, had to be reminded on Front Row this evening that culture is not the same thing as market goods, and that what sells is not a barometer of taste. He lamented that only in Britain is “a local prize” (the Booker) deemed more worthy that the Nobel, but it is not our place to moan about the lack of money or celebrity afforded our corner of the arts, but to find new ways to ensure that it is made available and, if nothing else, survives. It’s what wealthy patrons have been enabling in the arts for centuries, and if the market won’t support this stuff, we’d better find someone who will.

Thank you then, Mr Harold Falckenberg (Hamburg), Mr Antoine de Galbert (Paris), one Anonymous Patron (Barcelona), the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication (France), the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (the French again, we presume), the American Center Foundation (New York) and the Hessische Kulturstiftung (Frankfurt) for their generous support without which we would not have had the pleasure of Phyllis Kiehl’s Fat Mountain Scenes, or any of the other Metronome titles.

Fat Mountain Scenes is a story about an exclusive diet clinic, the Weiko Sud, where the fatties (her words, not mine) have taken over the asylum. Ebba, a new arrival, is just settling into the bizarre but surprisingly unstressful routine, which includes regular self-administered blood tests, sharply sloping dinner tables, and paper punishment suits for those who put weight back on (they stick to sweaty folds of skin and chafe until they rupture…), when a new physician struggles up the 180-step entranceway and attempts to institure a new regime. What follows is a cross between Lord of the Flies and Fat Camp, as Dr Tense’s followers square up against the mysterious Dr Sago, unseen head of the institute and gatekeeper to its mysteries.

While certainly not as experimental in form (Remainder, Stunning Lofts) or stunningly resurrected (The Young & Evil) as other Metronome titles, Fat Mountain Scenes still gets successfully under the skin, leaving a sense of deeper secrets buried beneath the flab than even the narrator reveals (although to what extent this is due to the translation - see here) - is unknowable). The connections with Kiehl’s other work, described as “plump, textile sculpture” which manifests when “the more extraordinary visual elements of her stories renounce their status as printed matter” must be fascinating - please let STML know if you find any examples…

In a truly terrible piece of news, legendary US press Loompanics Unlimited is going out of business. Loompanics has been publishing subversive non-fiction in all its forms out of Port Townsend, Washington for almost thirty years, describing its editorial policy thus:

What we really like to see is someone who knows what he’s talking about, take a subject that is little-known, or even abhorrent, and then write a straightforward how-to-do-it book about it. Books such as The Art & Science of Dumpster Diving, Methods of Disguise, Making Crime Pay, Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead, If We Can Keep a Severed Head Alive…, How to Start Your Own Country, Did Jesus Exist?, Practical LSD Manufacture, Combat Knife Throwing, The $51 Fantasy, etc., etc.

We like challenging books, funny books, exciting books, crazy books. Useful books, outrageous books, beyond-the-pale books, over-the-top books. How to Build Your Own Log Home for Less Than $15,000, Stealth Juror, Home Workshop Professional Lock Tools, How to Make Driver’s Licenses and Other ID on Your Home Computer, They Were White and They Were Slaves, Everything You Know is Wrong, How to Be an Ass-Whipping Boxer, Guns Save Lives, etc., etc. We literally cannot get enough of this stuff.

The nature of Loompanics’ catalogue has got it into plenty of trouble over the years, including fairly blanket censorship on advertising anywhere near the mainstream, but in the words of Loompanics’ famously outspoken president Michael Hoy: “This catalog is for knowledge. It is for joy and pleasure. It is for the unlimited potential of each individual - for the undying spirit of human freedom and resistance to tyranny. Do not let anyone tell you what to think or feel - decide for yourself.”

In honour of thirty years of excellent business (during which STML has taken advantage of several pieces of DIY advice you’re unlikely to find in Homebase), we urge you to head over to the Loompanics website and avail yourself of their extraordinary back catalogue, all at 50% off! STML has his eye on this little gem…

What can we say about the New English Library? For me, they are one of the Holy Grails of bookshopping: tight, grubby little paperbacks, never more than a couple of quid, always fascinating. They are kind of anti-Penguins: cheap, affordable paperbacks for the masses, ranging across fiction and non-fiction, but with absolutely no redeeming social value whatsoever: pure pulp. NEL would have a Pelican up the alley any day of the week: take my fantastic NEL First Paperback Edition (May 1975) of Found Naked And Dead: The facts behind the Thames-side murders by Brian McConnell. In the early seventies, Pelican is producing slim sky-blue tomes, written by academics, like The Young Offender and John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. NEL has a London hack slithering in the Thames-side mud, interviewing whores in Notting Hill and returning a curiously nihilistic open verdict on the identity of ‘Jack the Stripper’. They may try Violent Men: Inside The Psychology of Violence, but NEL has got Richard Allen’s Skinhead Girls. Top that.

The information on NEL is sketchy. The earliest I’ve found appear at the beginning of the sixties, publishing mainly Science Fiction – a tradition that extends throughout their heyday, with notables including Isaac Asimov, Michael Moorcock, A.E. Van Vogt and Frank Herbert. A lot of Edgar Rice Burroughs – but that’s probably a skewed sample provided, as all second hand favourites are, by authors who swing periodically in and out of fashion. A sign of things to come towards the end of the decade – handbooks on Judo and Ju-jitsu, Jan Hudson’s Sex and Savagery of Hell’s Angels (all 1967), and, in 1969, a reprint of Gillian Freeman’s Leather Boys, the charming tale of two 18-year-old Rockers – not a million miles from Allen’s skinhead boys – who, during a run of burglaries, end up falling in love.

But it’s in the Seventies that they really hit their stride, opening the decade with titles such as French Art of Sex Manners, Bastard Brigade, Girl in the Centrefold and Gynaecologist (all 1970), most of which I’d be more than happy to spend a few hours with… For the rest of the decade they appear to put out up to ten books a week; shoddy, glaring things - even when the authors are J.D. Salinger, Emile Zola, Jack London or Anatole France, all of whom appear in the NEL, or it’s classier daughter imprint Signet, during the 70s. Thrillers, crime, exposes, salacious history, self-delusional self-helps - they all get the NEL treatment. (One of my favourite twists in the list: in 1967, Stephen Baker and Eric Gurney bring out How to live with a Neurotic Dog and How to live with a Paranoid Cat; three years later, it’s How to Live with a Neurotic Wife. In Hardcover too - a rare treat for NEL.)

NEL starts to fade in the second half of the eighties, producing a mere handful of title compared to its heyday. Perhaps significantly, this is the same time that Penguin starts to phase out the last vestiges of its ‘house style’ - the coloured grid design, the prominently displayed avians. The era of the mass-market cheap paperback is over: the era of the mass-market expensive paperback is just about to arrive. These days, NEL is technically an imprint of Hodder Headline, who are not known for their boat-rocking activities, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find anything new coming out (with the rather interesting-looking exception of this). Here’s to the old NEL - never knowingly unshocked.

(Oh, and if you’re upset about the lack of links in this post, you try googling ’Found Naked And Dead’ and see where it gets you.)