Link

Short interview with Susan Tomaselli at 3:AM here.

Buy this book!

Just to reiterate, in case you don't yet feel like it's been pushed down your throat, it's called "Clear Water", it has a bikini-clad, Thatcherite-haired pin-up on the cover and reading it will make you feel nervous, uncomfortable and queasy. You lucky bastards.

You can get it from Amazon or in various 3-for-2 and Buy-One-Get-One-Half-Price offers in your local giant Borderstones. It's even in some of the indies... Anyway, buy it, read it, hate it and return to leave me unhelpful comments.

Reviewmination

Nice micro-review of "Clear Water" in The Independent this morning (Scroll down a bit. A bit more. Squint. There it is). Potted version: "Buy the satire get the soul for free".

Attack of the Giant 50s Thatcher Babe

I'm posting this up again cos it fell off the front page and it's just so.. bright and, er... colourful. I don't think my reputation at Faber has ever recovered from insisting that the pin-up's hair had to be more Thatcherite... but it was for thematic reasons! Not because... oh God, no. How could they think that..???

In other news, happened across a quite amazing archive of poets reading their poetry at Pennsounds - the University of Pennsylvania's online resource for, uh, poets reading their poetry. Obviously something of a US bias but if you're interested in hearing Mayakovsky, Apollinaire, WC Williams, Robert Creeley, Tom Raworth etc etc, you 're in luck. Oh, it also contains a quite hysterically awful version of Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience". Sung. By Allen Ginsberg. Lovely man, I'm sure, but could he hold a tune..?

Classy, innit..?

Cover for the "mass market" (misnomer alert) paperback edition due out in June...

Offsite Quote Business

I've stuck all the quotes over here for ease of access, in the hope that I'll find something interesting to write about...

You can get to 'em from the sidebar, too...

If You Only Read One Review...

...read this one. Very encouraging words in the Independent on Sunday from Matt Thorne.

Moving To Rhyl

New quotes:
"A brave and ambitious treatise on modern England.. a weird and wonderful trip" - i-D

"A black and baroque talent" - Tribune

"Few debut novelists display the ambition shown by Will Ashon in Clear Water... a unique and spell-binding tale that heralds the arrival of a major new talent" - Rhyl & Prestatyn Journal

When I was a kid I went on a school trip to North Wales and, one wet and grey day, we ended up at the Rhyl leisure centre. And it had a wave machine and slides and a giant octopus, which was bascially sci-fi stuff 25 years ago. So, I like to believe that Rhyl was and remains ahead of its time...

...End Quotes

Great write up in the Independent on Sunday this morning as part of their Fifty Hot Books For Summer:

"Startlingly original and defiantly British... Ashon is a major new talent."

Begin Quotes...

Some press quotes:

"A shiny, hyper-modern dream of Eden is here stripped to its bloody heart... a realism that can include moments of sheer, quiet, sad poetry... watch this space, because Ashon can really write" - The Guardian

"A brawny, dystopian novel that never loses its Orwellian sense of humour … Clear Water is a rewarding novel that signals the arrival of a skilled cultural commentator." - Time Out

"There is an impressive imagination at work here and... flashes of brilliance in the writing." - The New Statesman

"A weird and wonderful look at the dreadful side of modern England" - Esquire

"Extraordinary... A superbly written exposé of consumer society and contemporary mores by a prodigious new talent." - The Book Magazine

"A darkly comic critique of Britain... every bit as encompassing as a Don De Lillo novel... an extremely compelling book" - Flux

"Not often is Englishness and all it means treated with the same extended examination as Clear Water provides; as such this is an important novel; one which is as compelling, funny and accessible as it is literary." - Blowback

"A remarkable, darkly funny, addictive and far ranging novel" - Clash

Binary Translator

For those interested enough (I know, I know, there are none of you), here is the rather wonderful Binary Translator. Never again will strings of ones and noughts be merely strings of ones and noughts to you! Phew.

Sealand Burns

Sealand, the original inspiration for Vernaland, has caught fire and been burnt out, according to various online reports.

Being Discounted

I share a rare honour with Paul Gasciogne this week. Not only do we both like weeping (and drinking (though in different ways)), we now share the honour of being "aggressively discounted" by Amazon as a Deal of the Week. What larks!

Fun for Sociopaths

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, you can now make friends with characters from a book! Well, this book. The book I keep going on about.

Follow the links below to various Myspace pages, meet the characters in question, become their buddies, live a life rich in hopeless fantasy and wasted man-hours. Alternatively, use the opportunity to read a bit of the book. What book? Oh, keep up...

King James
Peter Jones
Jimmy Patel
Verna Landor

Too Little Too Late

This blog has only really one purpose. Or maybe two. Or more. But mainly it's to try and persuade you to read (and, yes, buy) "Clear Water" by Will Ashon. It's a book, it has 330-odd pages. It has a natty cut-out dust jacket. Blah. It's an entirely self-defeating enteprise as you'll probably only be here if you've already heard about it.

If you have heard about the book, maybe some of the information here will be useful to you.

If you've read it you can leave abuse.

That way, everyone wins.