New books.

Outbox and Other Poems and The Light that Remains and Other Stories are amongst us, and really quite phenomenally available for purchase.

Outbox and Other Poems costs £7.99 and has the following blurb:

He swam the Mekong in Dong Det
with two dark-haired sisters who cast their nets
before inviting him to share their haul….
- Extract from ‘Outbox’ by Nicky Mesch

Outbox and Other Poems contains the winning entries from the Leaf Books Open Poetry Competition that ran during the winter of 2006. The thirty poems within cover such diverse subjects as love and hate, boat-building and ghostly rats, dreamfishers, funerals and science classes. What unites them is their brilliance.

The Light that Remains and Other Stories costs £9.99 (p&p £1.69 - lots of pages in this one) and is blurbified thusly:

‘Keep walking,’ he said, and we kept walking. The excited sound of the spectators at the edges of the crash itself, the whee-oosh clamour of the approaching ambulance, the burning scent that the cars offered up: none of it attracted him. Other people saw the wreckage, a body lying in the street (still alive, I think) and rushed over, like flies wanting corpses, for whatever reasons they have – but not him. Not at all. ‘Keep walking,’ he said.
- Extract from ‘The Light That Remains’ by Paul Currion.

A bookish boy’s learning to experience his city as a blind man would experience it; a fabled and helplessly destructive dragon that lives at the local takeaway and a biker’s encounter with a Harley-fancying mermaid. The Light That Remains and Other Stories contains the winning entries from the Leaf Books Open Short Story Competition that ran during the winter of 2006. The fourteen superlative stories residing within represent the pick of crop.

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We think they're probably the nicest couple of books we've ever made. Kindly buy them and agree.

In other news, the judging for both the short story and micro-fiction competitions is ongoing, as is the production of Ukraine and Other Poems, as are several critiques and the website revamp and the launching of the whole Mostly Life phenomenon and also I need to fill out some forms for the dentist. It's all go really, and the printer isn't work. Fine.

Sam.