Appearances in November

There's a fair amount to report in November, to make up for a fairly quiet October*.

The book
First up, Care of Wooden Floors is now on sale in the USA by Amazon Publishing/New Harvest, and throughout November it's just $3.99 on the Kindle as part of the Kindle 100 promotion. However I do urge you to consider buying the hardback, which is a beautiful object.

Here I am talking about the book from Amazon's own video, against a variety of scenic Shoreditch backdrops.

Here I am at the Huffington Post talking about the somewhat unusual business of being the first debut novelist published directly by Amazon. I was also interviewed by the New York Times and NPR, and the book has had some really good reviews, including this rave from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Many more nice reviews on the Amazon page, if you should be so inclined.

Also I understand that Puulattian Kunnossapito, the Finnish edition of COWF published by the good folks at Moreeni, is also out now. Or very soon. Physical copies of it exist, anyway, look:

Thanks to my Finnish translator, Seppo Raudaskoski, for that photo and for rendering the book into Finnish.


Talking (mostly in south London)
On Wednesday 7 November at 1pm Lee Rourke and I will be taking part in Kit Caless's series Mapping the Metropolis on Resonance FM. We will be talking about canals, a subject dear to Lee's heart. (If you haven't read Lee's book The Canal, you really should - read John Self's review, linked above, if you're not sure.)

On Wednesday 14 November at 7.30pm I'll be interviewing the incomparable Jonathan Meades about his new book, Museum Without Walls, at the wonderful Bookseller Crow in Crystal Palace, south London. Here's a Facebook page for the event, and here's an Eventbrite page where you can reserve a ticket. The event is free, but likely to be very popular so it's worth RSVPing. Building Design subscribers can read my review of Museum Without Walls here. I gave it five stars - it's really, really good.

Lastly, but not leastly, on Tuesday 20 November at 7pm I'll be taking part in a fantastic evening of short stories at the Review bookshop in Peckham, part of the Peckham Literary Festival. It's a really great line-up: Benjamin Wood, author of The Bellwether Revivals, Nikesh Shukla, author of Coconut Unlimited, Jim Bob, author of Storage Stories and Driving Jarvis Ham, and Sam Mead, author of A Thing That Was Built to Be Torn Down. And me. FREE.


Writing
I have six (six!) very short stories in issue 3 of Disegno magazine (which has a sharp new website). They each describe an "erotic" (or sensual, at least) reaction to a design object, and each is inspired by a true story told by the designer of each piece. It's an experiment in design fiction, but it's not Design Fiction, capital D capital F, in the strictest sense. Some of the stories are funny, some are sad, each taps into that emotional or sensual side of a piece - I'm a shade (50 shades?) uncomfortable with the e-word because I always hear it in the sexful tones of Zapp Brannigan.

Also there are a couple of new Cabinet pieces on the loose. First is a history of that maddening garment, the straitjacket, in Cabinet 46, which is on stands now. Second is an introduction to the fascinating Phillips Hydraulic Computer, a water-powered model of the British economy, in Cabinet 47, out shortly.

Some reviews are also now online: on Edwin Heathcote's charming book The Meaning of Home in Building Design (£, sorry) and on the Barbican's  "Designing 007: 50 Years of Bond Style" in Icon.

Also, here's an odd little piece I wrote for NPR's "Three Books" strand.

I think that's everything ...

* Outwardly quiet - we had a baby, and it was the longest and busiest month I can remember, even though it involved very little writing work. All very worthwhile though.

The New Aesthetic now and later

My essay on The New Aesthetic has now been up at Aeon for a while, and the Tumblr that started it all is back online. It's a huge old topic, for sure, and that essay was pushing 6,000 words at one point until judicious editing brought it back to a more digestible 3,000 or so. I don't intend to recap its main points here - this post is more intended to tidy up some loose ends.

First of all: did you all have a good look around the rest of Aeon? It's a completely new online magazine with an emphasis on ideas, culture, science and memoir. Take some time and have a poke around at the other essays online in the launch edition, and bookmark the site, it's worth it.

Second, some loose ends from the essay itself. Some responses, such as Rory Stott's, wondered at the next steps for the New Aesthetic: if it isn't a movement (and it isn't), could there be a movement? Having identified the political concerns inherent in the New Aesthetic, what can be done about them? How should designers act?

... Which is a whole 'nother essay in itself, but there are a couple of things I'd like to point to. First is to properly credit the work of BERG. I first came across the idea that technological seamlessness could be A Bad Thing in conversation with Schulze, Jones and Webb, while I was writing my Icon profile of the studio last year (Icon 099). Contra pernicious seamlessness, they said their philosophy was one of "beautiful seams". Which could be a New Aesthetic design manifesto in a nutshell, or part of one. Also if you want to see incredibly smart people designing with New Aesthetic antennae turned on and properly calibrated, look to BERG.

The other direction to look is the work of Keller Easterling, possibly the most important architectural theorist working today. I've just finished reading "The Action is the Form: Victor Hugo's TED Talk", her essay for Strelka Press, and it's just astonishing. It's like sipping from networked broth in which the architecture of tomorrow is broiling. The essay forms a bridge between Easterling's 2005 book Enduring Innocence, which introduced the idea of architecture being reduced to a series of "spatial products", and architecture as nothing but an expression of data, and her forthcoming book Extrastatecraft, on zones, which is likely to be incredibly special and important if this essay for Design Observer is anything to go by. God only knows if she's even aware of the New Aesthetic, but she perfectly shows how it couples with architecture and what it could mean for activism. So, my advice is make those essays your next stop, then buy her books. She knows what's going on.

Joining the paperback club

Care of Wooden Floors officially came out in paperback in the UK yesterday, although it's been on the shelves in a few places for a few days and might take a day or two to filter through everywhere. It's part of the Waterstones Book Club this autumn, which means you can get it there for a substantial discount and if you don't like it they'll give you your money back. So, a pretty enticing offer, but it's available from all good retailers, be they your friendly local indie bookseller, affable railway terminal stationer or hail-fellow-well-met internet retail colossus. 

Collected Irks

This is a rant concerning a detail that many of you will consider inconsequential. But this is my blog, and blogs are home of the triviality-induced crosseyed hissy-fit. So no apologies.

I love anthologies and compilations of essays and reviews. Love 'em. Can't get enough. I've just finished Christopher Hitchens' mammoth Arguably, presently I'm reading Jonathan Meades' hefty Museum Without Walls, next in line is Mark Dery's welterweight I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts. Such is my taste for the format I might even get the AA Gill. I don't know what gave me this taste for longform episodic nonfiction; Tom Wolfe or Hunter S Thompson, but I can't remember who I read first.

However I have a recurring problem with these anthologies, one that baffles me as much as it irritates me. These collected essays all appeared at different times and in different places. They are often assembled out of chronological order. That's all fine. But the date and location of appearance is mostly only given at the end of each essay. That's annoying. But it can be worse, and worse. Sometimes only the date is given, and the original publication is hidden in the copyright info or the index. Sometimes (and this is the case with the new Meades) only the date is given and there is no way of telling where the essay appeared. And on very rare occasions, not even the date is given.

Date and location of first publication are vital pieces of information, crucial to properly understanding the texts, and they should be given at the head of the essay, under the title. I am sick of having to skip ahead to see if, for instance, X is writing about JG Ballard before or after his death, or Y is writing about George W Bush before or after his re-election. Why are readers treated this way? Is there a rationale beyond mere convention? Do anthology editors believe that readers do not like to be reminded of the fact that they are reading "second hand" pieces? That seems condescending and deceptive. Some other reason? Perhaps essayists or their editors do not like to let readers see how a writer's cloth is cut to suit their clients - how a voice might seem to alter depending on whether one is appearing under the masthead of The Spectator or The Guardian. But this sort of subtlety is precisely why contextual information is invaluable. And we are all adults - surely the intelligent reader will appreciate that writers gotta write.

In summary: knock it off. Please. And to end on a positive note, William Gibson's Distrust that Particular Flavour is a recent example of an anthology that did it right and put the info up front. Sadly it's the only one I can think of. But it can be done. 

Appearances in August

Is it 12 August already? Crikey, how time flies. Here's where I can be found (the rest of) this month.

Most importantly, I'm appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 22 August. Appearing twice, in fact. At 8.30pm I'm reading & talking with Argentinian debut novelist Iosi Havilio, whose book Open Door is published in the UK by recently-Booker-longlist-anointed And Other Stories. A bit before that, at 5.30pm, I'm participating in the Amnesty International Imprisoned Writers Series, reading in support of imprisoned Ethiopian journalist Eskinder Nega. Please do come along. I'll also be in Edinburgh for a few days around these events, so if I know you & you're in town, drop me a line - it would be particularly nice to put some faces to some Twitter names.

The Edinburgh reading will also be the (fairly low-key) launch of the paperback of Care of Wooden Floors - they will be on sale at the event, an early chance to buy as the official pub date is 30 August. Anyway, please do look out for it in shops from the end of August, with its charming green cover, left, designed by Jo Walker.

I'm in print in a few other places in August as well. Everyone should rush out and buy Icon 111, not because of my contributions but because it's a truly wonderful issue with the theme "Restless Cities". Under that banner comes Geoff Manaugh on the implications of ungovernable "feral" cities, Debika Ray on the neoliberal "Charter city" concept, Fatema Ahmed's interview with professor David Harvey on cities in revolt and Justin McGuirk on Sao Paulo's periphery. My contributions are a review of PD Smith's wonderful book CITY and a short report on Carmody Groarke's Filling Station.

Another review by me appears in this week's Building Design - on the subject of Rowan Moore's Why We Build - ambitious, erudite, witty, gossipy, mostly excellent, with some weak points. Update, 13.8: The piece is now online (subs only, sorry).

For a change of pace, there's an essay by me in the new Architectural Review Asia-Pacific (#127), out shortly, on the "psychopathic interior" - that is, the home decor tastes of serial killers. Check it out.

COWF in Miniature

Doll's houses aren't generally my thing, but if you've read Care of Wooden Floors you'll know Oskar's eerie flat has a doll's-house quality to it - a small world, exact to every detail, set up to please its owner. The hapless narrator, inserted into this world, becomes something of a plaything for Oskar's whims.

Perhaps my parents picked up on this vibe, because when the book was published back in February, they made me a doll's-house set themed around it. Nice gift, huh? And an amazing thing to do for a writer, if you have one in the family - I was left pretty much in tears. Just recently I talked about it with my American editor and it was only then that I thought it might be nice to share the set with the world.

So here it is, set up. All the important elements of the book are present: a sheet of wood veneer for the floor, two cats, a piano, red wine and cleaning products.

What you see on the floor by the foot of the table is a little portable tile of veneer with a red mark on it - the first stain. On the other side of the tile is a bigger, redder stain, for ... later.

There's another view of the stain, and the bucket of cleaning products (including blue jaycloth) and mop. Exactly as described.

There's the second cat in the piano. (I'm aware the cats are the wrong colours, and I seem to have put the keys on the piano the wrong way around, don't write in!) The set also includes sheet music for Oskar's great work, Variations on Tram Timetables, and a couple of Oskar's hundreds of bossy notes.

In a rather meta touch, there's also a copy of Care of Wooden Floors - my Care of Wooden Floors, not the holistic New Age lifecare bible by Chandler Novack.

That's it. My parents are wonderful people. There are a few more pictures on my Flickr photostream. 

Appearances in June

Not much in the way of print this month (more in July), but two real-life appearances, both next week.

On Monday 11 June I'm reading at the wonderful regular lit night The Book Stops Here. Also appearing are two other novelists: Emily Perkins, whose most recent book is The Forrests, and Chibundu Onuzo, author of The Spider King's Daughter - a fellow Desmond Elliott Prize longlistee and one of the Guardian's literary talents to watch in 2012. It's at The Alley Cat, 4 Denmark Street, London WC2H 8LP - the event is free, doors open at 7.30pm, readings start at 8pm. Come!
Update, 11.6.12: Also reading is DW Wilson, winner of last year's BBC National Short Story Prize, who has either just been added to the line-up or (more likely) I missed the first time around - for which, apologies.

On Wednesday 13 June, I'm taking part in the launch of USELESS: New Writing in Art and Design, a publication produced by the students of the Royal College of Art's inaugural MA in Critical Writing. As the name suggests, the theme of the publication is USELESSNESS, a subject I'll be saying a few words about, before a series of performances on the theme. I led a couple of workshops on this project and the work being produced was really first rate - if you want to get a taste of the next generation of design writers then this is the place. The event is at the Banner Repeater gallery in Hackney and starts at 6.30pm. As far as I know it's free. Come!
Update, 11.6.12: More details about the event here. DJ sets by DJ sets by David Crowley, Brian Dillon, Jeremy Millar and Nina Power. Unmissable, I'd say.