Potential new avenues...

Exclusively Independent is all about supporting the independent sector. By bringing together publishers of all sizes, titles are highlighted that so often go unnoticed.

Always looking for new ways to promote each book, we are considering making each title available in different formats as well as potentially working with additional, larger publishers.

At this stage, nothing is confirmed, however it's interesting to see how we can push the project, open it up to a wider audience and have that desired result: bringing fantastic books to everyone's attention.

Lauren

Guest Blog from Gavin at Quartet Books

One of the selected titles this month is Dazed & Aroused by Gavin James Bower (Quartet Books). This sharp and highly entertaining novel is refreshing and enables the reader to delve into the glitzy, glamorous, and addictive world of fashion.

Blurb:
For six hectic months, season to season in the High Fashion calendar, twenty‐something male model Alex hurtles between London, Paris and Milan, absorbed in the ruthless world of the catwalk. His long‐term girlfriend, Nathalie, is desperate to rekindle their love; his oldest friend, Hugo, though regarding Alex’s so‐called career as frivolous, continues to urge fidelity; while his father, reduced to a voice on an answer machine, nevertheless persists in seeking his estranged son’s approval.

As his stock as a model soars, Alex is increasingly drawn into a world of predatory sex, drug‐induced infatuation and a growing bewilderment with the alluring, seductive shallowness of all he sees around him. The centre cannot hold...

Here is an exclusive, deleted scene from the book:

After the shoot is over I dream I’m with the two Japanese stylists and we’re in a club and have a table and are ordering bottles of U’Luvka vodka with fireworks on top and pitchers of cranberry and orange and the club is full of footballers and pop stars and 'New Gold Dream 81082-83-84' by Simple Minds is playing really loud and we actually dance on top of the table at one point.

Dazed from a day in the sun and a night of mainly drinking alcohol I ask them if they want to leave with me and they say 'Yes' and nod simultaneously and we all go back to a five-star hotel suite that I think is mine and we do some coke in the bathroom and I show them the trick with the Parliament cigareet and this makes them giggle and I think this means they're impressed.

We start kissing in the bathroom and they drag me into the bedroom and make me get undressed and stand for them in the middle of the room while they stare at me and whisper to one another but I'm not at all self-conscious and just stand there nude.

I join them on the bed and get them to turn around and then I take a moment to decide which one of them looks best from behind but it's actually purely academic because it's my dream and let's face it I can do what I want.

She's the one in front of me, the siren and the ecstasy.

New gold dream...

Many thanks to Gavin for providing such a fantastic blog. Visit Quartet Books' site by clicking here and browse among other brilliant titles that they have to offer.

Cameron Talks Exclusively During Election Day!

One of Exclusively Independent's very own titles, Dave Cameron's Schooldays by Bill Coles is being featured on the Legend Press site throughout the day.

Click here to visit the site and read hilarious diary snippets. One will be posted almost every hour - What do you think might be going through the Tory Leader's mind today?!

Lauren

Guest Blog from Philip Ward

Featured in the current cycle of Exclusively Independent is the fantastic Mine Haha translated by Philip Ward. This title is the only available translation of the most celebrated fictional work by the influential German dramatist Frank Wedekind.

At the heart of a forest lies a mysterious girls’ boarding school, cut off from the outside world by a great wall and barred gates. Within, a group of youngsters gather round a small coffin, from which emerges a new pupil, Hidalla…

Frank Wedekind (1864–1918) has always fascinated me. He seems like a man born out of his time. You look at photos of him taken a hundred years ago singing self-composed songs to his own accompaniment and you think of Bob Dylan in his grizzled later incarnations. So it was fitting that I was led to Mine-Haha by one of the grandes dames of rock’n’roll, Marianne Faithfull. In her latest volume of memoirs she writes about Wedekind’s strange novella, speculating on similarities to her own upbringing among the Braziers Park community and regretting that it had never been translated into English. Here was my cue. I had already translated Franziska, one of Wedekind’s lesser-known plays, for a production at London’s Gate Theatre, so I was no stranger to his bizarre world. What encouraged me is how others feel at home there too. As I worked on the text, I discovered Innocence, the beautiful French film version of Mine-Haha. Then the Broadway rock musical Spring Awakening opened in London; not my cup of tea (I’m more of a Sondheim man) but young audiences went wild for it. In summer 2009 Lulu, Berg’s opera based on two Wedekind plays, was revived at Covent Garden. And as I write, Wedekind is set to hit the London stage yet again, with emergent director Anna Ledwich bringing her adaptation of the Lulu plays to the Gate Theatre in June.

In Mine-Haha, his most substantial prose text, Wedekind rehearses the concerns of his dramas – childhood, education, sexual awakening, the status of women – in concentrated fairytale form. I think its time has come.

Many thanks to Philip for putting together this blog and providing a great insight into his work.