II
An excerpt from Michael Salu's work in progress novel “II”
Waiting Rooms
INT. A well-lit room, sparsely
furnished. Time of day?
Unspecified.
Waiting Rooms, by Imogen Reid was originally published (on paper) by Hotel Magazine #3, then online by Zeno Magazine.
Swamp
What’s the swamp? The swamp is a feeling. It’s a feeling of being stuck. The first time the inside of my head felt like a swamp I was eleven years old; it was 1982. Today, I’m stuck in the swamp and remembering that first time. Then I was living somewhere else. Now I live in London.
Between the Lines
1. A word gets written, thought better of, deleted. Replaced. Did it exist?
2. A letter is mistyped and corrected into oblivion. It was never the letter’s fault.
3. Letters can also be misplaced and misdirected. As well as misleading.
4. A word is a family of letters.
5. How many families are misspelled?
6. Many words are written knowing they’ll never make the final cut. Some.
Extract from Instructions from Light
This extract is from pages 155–7 of Instructions from Light by Emma Bolland published by Joan in 2023. Kristen Kreider writes 'Complex, crafted, acerbic, un-nerving, Instructions from Light is writing at its most lucid'. An illustrated poem / novella / screenplay, Jake Arnott writes that it is ‘A startlingly bold act of adaptation that renders a lost film as an illuminated manuscript, where text itself is transfigured into moving images. A compelling drama of language and silence'. Instructions from Light contains the first translation into English of the French Impressionist film maker Louis Delluc's 1920 screenplay Le Silence.
Great Novels of the Twenty-First Century
This is less a list than a series of recommendations; it is unranked and serves as a jumping off point into the fabulous world of twenty-first century fiction. Some of the authors are well-known, others may surprise you. Each book has been lovingly hand-picked by a Mercurius editor/contributor. No doubt the list contains glaring omissions. But perhaps that doesn’t matter.
Weeping in the Middle of a Roundabout
When they were a couple, Sam and Pam constantly disagreed with each other. Drinks vessels rim up or down? Windows open or closed. Monogamy or affairs? Sam, a lecturer in aesthetics (notable articles on Stravinsky’s ambivalence to radio) would argue cups go up and down with so-called monogamy. Pam – an abstract painter (compared to John Hoyland) thought the opposite.
2 Mouths
I can’t concentrate. I lie down in the afternoon when I sh/could be working. I lie down like my mother lay down. I thought she’d been sunbathing, until I realised she’d been resting before dying. I used to think she was lazy, lying down when there’s so much to do.
Famine: An Artwork
With God, the dirty ould bodach, running around in ditches spying on us, my childhood was a very watched event. The concept of privacy didn’t hit me (and it was a good schkelp across the face) until much later, and when it did hit (in my early adulthood) I was able to identify those scratchy doubts I’d had as a kid as privacy’s absence. A bodach in every step, God was one helluvanopponent. He was the demon that I battled right from the beginning, right from when I was able to form a memorable thought. Think Jam. Lovely. Suffer. The basics.
Food.
Thwart.
This Voice
This Voice is a multi-media work by Andrew Hodgson. Presented here are: This Voice (1), an audio-visual work commissioned for Humber Mouth - Hull Literature Festival, 2021, and the text for a companion piece, This Voice (2).
Noir
Noir is a new piece from Imogen Reid, first published in Praxis, Eds: Andrew Hodgson, Chris Clarke and Rosie Snajdr, Manchester, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2021.
MUEUM
Mercurius is delighted to share a chapter from SJ Fowler’s novella MUEUM. A work of ludic menace, a puzzle without pieces, MUEUM pictures the amassing and dismantling of a public edifice, brick by brick, in prose that refracts and breaks the light emitted by history’s ornaments and history’s omissions.
Go On, extract
An exclusive extract from Tania Hershman’s debut novel: "How to tell your story? “I want to talk,” the Author says on page 1. The Narrator who has been assigned to assist her knows that what is needed now is permission. “Go on,” says the Narrator - and a book is born.
Weaving threads and following tangents, Tania Hershman’s debut novel, a hybrid “fictional memoir-in-collage”, tells one story and many stories: how is it to be a woman moving happily alone through the world? Who are you if not in relation to others? A woman walks through the cemetery, talking to the dead. A class of schoolgirls grapples with what anger is and might be. A baby is left by scientists in a forest. Someone claims to be your grandmother.
As the Author writes her way into and through what she needs to say, the Narrator watches her develop and blossom and wonders what will happen when they reach the end. Go on."
THE IMPERATIVE COMMANDS extract
THE IMPERATIVE COMMANDS is an anti-novel, a modern epic poem and method-poem in action. Using umpteen numerical and circadian constraints, melville spent one year harvesting and re-planting imperatives, assertions, instructions and ‘facts’ – so you don’t have to! The language of corporate, cultural and state instruction is our new lingua franca, but what, and how, are these instructions instructing us? Read this book to find out. A must-read for anyone who exists today, or tomorrow.
Let’s Go Round Again
1. 200
The canal’s tinge is grey suds and the level is too high, but these things are not our concern. Come out from the overhanging canopy still dripping the remnants of a shower into the lapping water, and creamy chippings glare, the sky the bright but dark blue of high summer. A storm has come and gone, not even a black smudge at the edge of memory.
Whale Therapy
“There comes a point when you will try anything. Harriet described herself as a whale therapist and said she would use techniques associated with these giant sea mammals to ease my anxieties. It seemed like a reasonable idea – I'd heard of equine therapy – so I turned up at a large detached house on the Loop Road in Whitehaven and waited for my instructions.”
A Star of Television and the Silver Screen
A new story by Douglas Cowie: “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re particularly pleased to have a special guest flying with us today, star of television and the silver screen—” And here he said the name of some actor, or actress, I supposed, but I couldn’t be sure because it sounded muffled, or at least I didn’t understand. A few people clapped. Heads began to turn around, looking for this celebrity, although why they thought he or she would be sitting back in economy class, I don’t know.
The Room
I look outside the window, see two strange stars in the Milky Way, unexpectedly hot and covered in ash. This is not what she is looking at, obviously. It’s what I’m looking at. She is looking out at the roof tiles, studying the slanting afternoon light. She finds the impression of the sunlight on the roof tiles quite particular, quite beautiful, and it inspires in her an ache, the kind one might experience when one’s entire body is racked with fever, a fever-ache, heavy and consuming, and she can’t decide what might satisfy this ache, possibly codeine or ice cream or a walk or a nap or a shot of dark rum with lime and sugar syrup, or possibly just really horny sex, but she does’t know which because her senses are hitting her up with this aimless ache: all of her best wants hurtling at her, meteoric.
Post-Partum Document
Her little blue-eyed boy, that’s what her friends called him, and Iris decided she’d best adopt that nickname too because she hadn’t thought of one herself yet. She just called her baby ‘Nick’. She didn’t think that he looked like a Nicholas, although he did look remarkably like his father and, as his father was also called Nicholas she supposed that, actually, he must. Remarkable really was the word for it. They had the same square jaw, the same beady eyes, the same screwed-up mouth, always so small unless he was bawling which set her teeth on edge.
Extract from Seven Steeples
An extract from Sara Baume’s new novel, Seven Steeples: THE MOUNTAIN WAS full of miniature eyes. There were the yellow discs of long-eared owls, the purblind blots of pygmy shrews, the immobile domes of bluebottles, the glinting black gems of brown rats.
The never-ending quest…
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