The Mookse and the Gripes discussion
Favorite Presses
>
Scratch Press
date
newest »
newest »
I had the pleasure to meet Tom last week and he very much sold me on the idea of the press. Other short story authors he admires include Wendy Erskine, Eley Williams and Ben Pester (who I also met last week) and I suspect they may feature in future collections.The Guardian covers the new press as part of a general overview of the short-story boom here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
And the first collection here:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202...
I like short stories , but I don’t like reading one story right after another. I get more out of them reading one a day I think.
This would be perfect for that as they aren’t really designed to be read back to back.
I love short stories, and these days they are just about all my limited focus can handle. Thanks for posting. I will certainly check them out.
We are named after a strange sensation - the feeling of stroking the soft fur of a cat, to discover later as you walk away, that it scratched you.
Which, for us, is what a short story is like...
A new publisher, set up by Tom Conaghan (who also works as an Editor for Lolli Editions), dedicated to the art of the short story.
Their first publication, out in March 2022, is Reverse Engineering. It's an anthology of 7 previously published short stories from masters of the craft - Jon McGregor, Irenosen Okojie, Jessie Greengrass, Sarah Hall, Mahreen Sohail, Chris Power and Joseph O'Neill - but each story is accompanied with an interview with the author deconstructing their own story. Hence the collection's name.
As Nicholas Royle, editor of the annual Best British Short Stories anthology puts it:
“Imagine being able to ask some of the short story’s top practitioners why they did this, what made them do that, and what on earth was going on here? If, like me, you think the short story is the greatest literary form, you will welcome this book, which subjects it to the level of scrutiny it deserves”