Will Buckingham's Blog, page 11

Forthcoming – Stealing with the Eyes

I’m delighted to be able to announce that my anthropological-memoir-of-sorts, Stealing with the Eyes, is due to out from Haus Publishing next year. It is a tale of possession, exorcism, gods, ancestors, anthropologists and unpaid debts, drawing upon the research I did into the wood-carving industry a quarter of a century ago (!) in the Tanimbar islands of Indonesia. I’ll post more closer to the time. The title, incidentally, comes from the Indonesian curi mata — a nicely succinct summation of the anthropological enterprise that was put to me by one of my Indonesian friends…

Ready for Lift-Off (and a review)

I’m very excited that my middle-grade novel, Lucy and the Rocket Dog is on the launchpad, and almost ready for lift-off. The launch date in the US is 15th August. It should also be available in the UK from around then, although a UK edition (with ‘Mom’ duly replaced by ‘Mum’, and any sidewalks — if there are any — converted into pavements) may be a little way off.

There’s a nice advance review on Lisa Maucione’s Literacy on the Mind blog. I’ll post more reviews as they appear.

Glitches and Gremlins

WillBuckingham.com has been down for a few days, due to a twitchy problem with the configuration of the server. It is now back up and running, so apologies for any interruption of service.

I’m hoping in the next couple of months to give this website a bit of extra love and some much-needed updates. Things are busy over here in Yangon, and internet is less reliable than I would like, so I’m a bit behind. But hopefully the gremlins, demons, bugs and glitches from the last few days will remain squashed.

Goat Music Review

I was delighted a couple of days ago to stumble across a review of Goat Music, my reinvention of the tale of Apollo and Marsyas, over on The Letterpress Project.

“The gods are largely spiteful, arbitrary, self-centred and generally driven by shabby motives…This is indeed a story of incautious hubris but in Buckingham’s hands its also a tale of the arbitrariness of power.”

The review, by Terry Potter, is also mirrored over on the Everybody’s Reviewing blog.

Goats, Blogs and Chinese Travels

It has been very busy recently, with moving house back home in the UK, and then — only a few days later — relocating to China for a year. I’m here in China to take up an associate professorship at Sichuan University, in the College of Literature and Journalism. About which more below.

But first, I should say something about goats! Because I’m delighted to say that my author copies of Goat Music, my latest novel, arrived today in the UK. They are four thousand or so miles away, and so I haven’t really had much of a chance to look at them yet. But from the photograph below, courtesy of Elee Kirk, they are looking good.

Goat Music is a bit of a departure from my usual work. It is an attempt to write a kind of modern-day satyr play, taking up the myth of Apollo and the satyr Marsyas, as well as pillaging the ancient Greek playwrights, to weave a tale about music, power and its abuses. In this sense, it forms a pair with my earlier book, The Descent of the Lyre, although the sensibility is somewhat different. In the UK, you can get hold of a copy here. It’s on general release, so should be easy to track down. I’d be interested to see what people make of this one, as it’s by any measure quite a curious book.

The next thing to mention is my moving to China. This has been in the works for a long time, and I’m glad to be here at long last. This is a chance to put my spoken Chinese to work, and to plunge more deeply into the world that was first opened up for me when I wrote my Sixty-Four Chance Pieces, the novel and/or short story collection that I wrote based upon the Yijing. So far, it has been good to be here, and I’m beginning to find my way around the various bureaucratic demands of life in contemporary China. I’m also managing to pull down my Chinese language from the dizzy heights of reading and talking about philosophy and literature, to the more practical business of daily life. How is it I knew the words for metaphysics, semiotics and hermeneutics when I arrived here, but not for washing up liquid? Anyway, teaching starts in October, and until them, I’m pursuing a number of tentative leads for new projects, whilst also making the most of the local food.

Finally, and in connection with this current move to China, I should say something about my new blog. Because I have a bit more thinking time, being freed up from some of my previous academic burdens, I’ve decided to set up a new blog. This will be more or less philosophical in tone, and it is over on waywardphilosophy.com. So I’ll continue to post general news and snippets over here, but leave the heavy-lifting, and the more wayward flights of fancy, for my other blog. When I get time, I’ll integrate the RSS feed into the sidebar of this present blog, so everything will be nice and tidy.

That’s all the news for the time being. Now you’ve read this, go and bookmark my new blog. Oh, and buy yourself a copy of Goat Music. It has short chapters, and songs, and jokes. And, as I said above, it’s a strange kind of beast, just as a satyr is a strange kind of beast.

Rude Goats

As Goat Music — my novel about rude goats and brutish gods in mythological Greece — is now on general release, I thought I’d post this picture of a cheeky goat I met down in Lincolnshire the other weekend.

Goat Music is available from all the usual places. Get your copy from Hive.co.uk and support your local bookstore.

The Goats Have Been Released

I’m very pleased to announce that my novel Goat Music has just been published. It is a reinvention of the tale of Apollo and Marsyas, and features fallible gods, singing frogs, musical goats, and at the centre of it all, an irrepressible satyr. It has been very kindly blurbed by the wonderful Jonathan Taylor, who says the book is ‘playful and shocking, disturbing and brilliant.’

You can get the novel at the usual outlets, and if you are in the UK, from hive.co.uk.

Lucy and the Rocket Dog

I’m delighted to say that I’ve sold the rights for my forthcoming middle-grade children’s book, Lucy and the Rocket Dog. The book is about space-dogs, friendship, relativity, wormholes and other such matters. Knopf over in New York have acquired the rights, and so the book should be coming out in the summer of 2017. The Turkish edition, Lucy ve Laika, is coming out in the autumn of 2015.

See the brief news item in Publishers’ Weekly for more information.

Sixty-Four Chance Pieces in the Asian Review of Books

Jonathan Chatwin has written a very nice piece in the Asian Review of Books about my Sixty-Four Chance Pieces. We met up the other week down in Birmingham, and spent an enjoyable Saturday morning talking about writing, China and other matters. Here’s an extract from Jonathan’s write-up:

The tales of Sixty Four Chance Pieces wear the scholarly and creative struggles of their creator lightly. Playful and inventive, they link imagistically to the I Ching but do not require prior knowledge of the text, and generally avoid direct allusions to Chinese culture or history. The literary reference points are Western: Italo Calvino is a key influence on the text, particularly his novel inspired by the tarot, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, whilst there are also echoes of Borges and Garcia Marquez.

Buckingham’s stories are glimpses into worlds familiar yet somehow distant, their landscapes and cultures verging on the mythical… Eclectic, with a healthy dose of humour, the stories of Sixty Four Chance Pieces act as provocations to consider the nature of our respective political, social and personal realities….

To see the full review/article, go to the Asian Review of Books.

Divination in Nottingham Event

This coming week, on Tuesday 14th July, I’m doing an event at the Nottingham Writers’ Studio, reading from and talking about my I Ching-based novel-of-sorts, Sixty-Four Chance Pieces: A Book of Changes, then leading a workshop on writing and divination, putting the I Ching to work as a tool for writing. It should be fun and relaxed, and all are welcome. The time is 7pm, and the suggested donation is £1 for members and £3 for non-members. I’ll also have advance copies of the book on sale (not yet out in the UK), at a reduced price. Do come along if you are in town. Find out more at the event’s Facebook page. Or, if you are not a Facebooker, email me for more information.