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| Protest! |
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Full blurb:
Protest! is a limited edition, fiction anthology, consisting of three long short stories from three writers you might have heard of from the literary underground – STEVE FINBOW, JOSEPH RIDGWELL and MELISSA MANN. This is writing aimed at infecting your brain and immunizing you against the dull and the ho-hum of mainstream literature. It's a protest against logic, the stupid, the unthinking, the herd; against genre, turgid prose and the "how-to" "dot-to-dot" guides of creative writing courses.
Protest! is a homage to now. A collaboration between three writers who tell it like it is, not how we pretend it to be. In Protest! you'll find cases of psychopathology, doses of feminism and cases of beer. The book is written from a working class perspective, from the writers’ roots and from their boots. It is them urging the reader not to accept that's all there is. Think! Think! Think! Protest! Protest! Protest!
Unusually for a small indie press, this is a HARDBACK book, the design - the cover image and shape (it's square) - inspired by the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street album.
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First page first lines:
From Steve Finbow’s ‘Asylum Beach: Travels in the Heteroptia’
…large black dog beside him seems to be in similar distress; its brown eyes glassy, its breath ragged, a grey and pink tongue blackened with blood. He can see a steel fan and he waits for the relief of its draft as it turns slowly on its axis. If not for the etching of ice on the window, he would swear he was somewhere in the tropics—the air fetid and flowersome, his skin damp with the faint smell of urine, and a deeper odour of excremental decay. He watches the fan turn, notices the breeze menacing the white-plastic blinds, thawing the spider webs of ice; but the cool air never reaches him. He tries to lift his hand. Nothing happens. He can smell the dog’s breath, hears the rattle somewhere in its ribcage. He tries again to lift his hand—as if someone has drawn instructions for human movement and he has learned them by rote, exactly followed the guide, for his mind traces a line from its depths to the end of invisible fingertips, a dot-to-dot of electrical charges, impulses of will, and he feels his fingerprints surge into life, their valleys and hills, their ridges and clefts, prickle with the far reaches of a life. Blood fills his arteries and veins, his cartilages and tendons snap tort, relax, release, his bones creak and whinny. Pushing his hand into the deep matted fur of the dog, S feels vomit rush into his mouth. Trying not to swallow, tears well in his eyes, and he releases the bilious stew in a torrent, strings of thick matter hanging from his chin, dripping onto his shoulders and chest. Again, he reaches for the fur. His hands grasp warm air. There is no…
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Category: Short story collection
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Author: Steve Finbow, Joseph Ridgwell and Melissa Mann
NAME: Steve Finbow
ALIAS: Professor Big Nose. Bug.
LAST KNOWN ADDRESS: Kumiya Bar, Tokyo.
DOB: Earlier than you tthink.
PLACE OF BIRTH: London – The Great Wen.
SEX: Never known to say no.
RACE: What you got?
CRIMINAL CASE HISTORY
OFFENCE: Drug Abuse.
DESCRIPTION: Since the age of 12, continuous drug abuse including: alcohol, marijuana, cannabis, amyl nitrate, barbiturates, amphetamine sulphate, speed, LSD, cocaine, morphine, opium, heroin, and sundry other narcotics of dubious chemistry. Current drugs include: ramipril, bendroflumethiazide, simvastin, amlodipine, doxazosin mesilate, novorapid, insulin glargine, and Stella Artois.
DATE: Circa 1973-present.
DISCIPLINARY ACTION: Blackouts, kidney failure, pancreatitis, and four different types of coma.
OFFENCE: Mind Theft.
DESCRIPTION: Charged with lifting ideas and lines from other writers.
DATE: Unknown.
DISCIPLINARY ACTION: Unproven but he can feel the heat closing in.
NAME: Melissa Mann
ALIAS: Morrissey with tits. And balls.
LAST KNOWN ADDRESS: Walthamstow, East London.
DOB: Unknown. S’a mystery.
PLACE OF BIRTH: Bradford, Capital of England.
RACE: 400 metres hurdles.
SEX: Never. Saving herself for Russell Brand.
CRIMINAL CASE HISTORY
OFFENCE: Indecent Exposure
DESCRIPTION: Accused of exposing, in an open and obscene manner, the private parts of herself in stories and poems published widely in print magazines, anthologies and online.
DATE: 21/05/07
DISCIPLINARY ACTION: Acquitted. Court ruled that the defendant did not write with intent to cause alarm or offend others.
OFFENCE: Public Disorder
DESCRIPTION: Accused of hijacking the stage at a prestigious arts festival on the South Bank, London, and attempting to read a story that caused the middle-class families present to fear for their safety.
DATE: 25/05/2009
DISCIPLINARY ACTION: Released without charge. The court agreed with the defendant that the event was a poorly organized, pretentious pile of doggy-doo-doo that needed shaking up.
NAME: Joseph Ridgwell
ALIAS: Literary thug boozer.
LAST KNOWN ADDRESS: Kellett St, Kings Cross, Sydney, NSW 2011, Australia.
DOB: 1970s
PLACE OF BIRTH: East London.
RACE: English, Irish, French, Spanish
SEX: Strictly threesomes.
BEST KNOWN APHORISMS: ‘If you join them, you will always be at odds with them,
and everything they stand for.’
CRIMINAL CASE HISTORY
OFFENCE: The Search for the Lost Elation
DESCRIPTION: Has smoked it, drunk it, stabbed it, fucked it, written about it, and if he put it all down here, they’d just lift him again for it…
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Publisher: Beat the Dust Press
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Reviews:
"If the three heads of Cerberus were as contrasting in character, delivery and style as the trio of writers behind Protest! the crazed mutt would've spent most of his time crashing into walls and going through the litter bins. Given half a chance, however, he would chew your limbs off - in a variety of interesting, funny and painful ways." - Will Ashon, author of The Heritage.
"A smell of cordite hangs over the writing of Steve Finbow, Melissa Mann and Joseph Ridgwell. Passionate, intelligent and hungry, these three prose provocateurs are on a mission to prove there is no more effective a weapon than a loaded book." - Cathi Unsworth, author of The Singer and The Not Knowing.
"Protest! is the defiant manifestation of a trio of irrecuperable reprobates of the written word - interrogatively fevered and sexually seething, infinitely veering across time and space, but focused with brilliant fury on the insanity and exhilaration of the contemporary world and the awry human bodies that inhabit it. The act of reading fiction today is simply no longer viable without the experience of an intensive and extreme intimacy with an original language in transformation, and the fictions of Protest! supply that experience as a full-on smack to the chops." - Stephen Barber, author of The Tokyo Trilogy.
"Steve Finbow’s ‘Asylum Beach: Travels in the Heteroptia’ is a crazy mashup of a story, flipping between modern Thailand and some alien civilisation. The scenes bleed into each other in seamless juxtaposition. At times, you feel like this is a portrayal of a disturbed fantasy life; at other points it really does seem like you’re getting a glimpse of a new and unknowable world... [Finbow's] twenty-first century cut and paste vision is better than that of any other contemporary writer who has tried it. Melissa Mann’s ‘The Beautiful Fight’ is about the partnership between a self-loathing cleaner and an egotistic anarcho-feminist. It's well crafted, and poses questions about contemporary critiques of body image that we’re not yet prepared to answer. Joseph Ridgwell’s ‘The Battle of Barncleuth Square’ is an ensemble piece about the hand-to-mouth underworld of Australia at the turn of the century; European drifters mixing with dispossessed Aborigines and local wasters. This is really well done with a gallery of eccentrics and a real sense of place. That last quality binds the three stories together: a sense of place, and a sense of time. It’s what makes the anthology different and special. The authors of Protest! love to engage with the world: a task that the majority of mainstream novelists will not - or cannot - take on." - Max Dunbar, reviews' editor at 3:AM Magazine.
"Steve Finbow's “Asylum Beach” is an exhilarating onslaught... great writing... relentlessly exuburent. “The Beautiful Fight”, Melissa Mann’s story raises a lot of issues. It’s brilliantly crafted. It’s chilling. [Joseph] Ridgwell’s writing is a celebration of all that is comforting and fleeting a la Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski... All in all, it’s quite a debut from Beat the Dust Press; I look forward to future releases." - David F Hoenigman, Word Riot.
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| Book code: BTD029 |
| Price: £ 12.00 |
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