Mirrorball

The Ambulance Box

Nuclear Submarines

A Book of the Year!
Ron Butlin, the current Edinburgh makar, has chosen The Ambulance Box as one of his books of the year in today’s Sunday Herald. (The piece doesn’t seem to be online so I can’t link to it.) Recommending it alongside Brian McCabe’s Zero, Tom Pow’s Dear Alice and Polly Clark’s intimate and

The Order of Things
We always knew that the heart of Salt’s sales operation was an immensely technical process to rival Amazon. Watch and be dazzled …

BletherBox
At last you can see me haver briefly about The Ambulance Box in the video that Jen Hamilton-Emery took before the Northern Salt reading at the Manchester Literature Festival. Here it is in all its autumnal Manucunian glory: Over at the Salt blog, you can also see new videos of

Salination: Free Shipping and a New Audio Books Site
I’m a bit slow on this one, others having blogged it already, but there’s free shipping on all UK orders until Christmas from Salt’s online shop! Not only will it make your present buying easier, but you’ll make Chris, Jen and the rest of the redoubtable Salt team — not to mention the authors — very happy. I’m not slow on this one, however: if you’re after a change from the physical books or are particularly keen on hearing your poetry as well as reading it on the page, keep an eye on the brand new

Moving on from Prize Culture: How?
Following on from yesterday’s complaint against the lack of poetry in the shortlists for the Saltire Society literary awards, it occured to me that, if a specific poetry award is the solution, perhaps StAnza might be the organisation to oblige. Of course, the funding and administration of such an award would need to be sorted out, which might take a whilie, but I can imagine that a StAnza prize for the best collection and/or best first collection could carry considerable caché in the Scottish poetry scene. Still, deep down I’m sure there must be a better way than perpetuating and expanding the pr