Anne de Marcken’s IT LASTS FOREVER AND THEN IT‘S OVER reading list

Anne de Marcken, the 2022 Novel Prize co-winner and author of It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, published 7 March 2024, shares some books that inspired her novel. To read an extract and order the book visit our website.

The easiest companion reading list for me to assemble would be made of all the books from which the novel’s eight epigraphs are taken, but that feels like cheating. And really there are so many others – too many others. Here is just a handful specifically to do with monsters, monstrosity and grief:

Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer (2014)
I think it is the uncanny horror of this book that I love – a confusion between human and other that feels correct.

Autobiography of Red (1998) and Red Doc> (2013) by Anne Carson 
The monster protagonist of Carson’s Herakles retelling(s) exceeds his Western classical function as abject other, yet still lives – loves, suffers, goes on – in the register of mythos. 

Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair (2016)
A book of the body – particular, collective, political, epic – these poems are the monster’s precise indictment of the master. Here are grief and rage.

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World by Timothy Morton (2013)
We are breathing uncanny air in this time of climate catastrophe. Morton’s idea of the ‘hyperobject’ describes the immanent loss that I can feel in my bones and skin but still fail to grasp, both massive and diffuse, a loss I both suffer and cause.

Incubation: A Space for Monsters by Bhanu Kapil (2006)
A road story and a monster story, this book about moving and belonging between places and categories, can itself not be classified.

Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes, tr. Richard Howard (2012)
When you are grieving, people will give you books about grief. This is the only one I managed to take in at all. Maybe in part because the portions are very small (in grief I have felt like an invalid capable of only the smallest sips), but also because its preoccupation is with what has been lost, not with healing from loss.

FITZCARRALDO EDITIONS HIRES RACHAEL ALLEN TO LAUNCH A POETRY LIST IN 2025

Photo of Rebecca Tamás credit Sophie Davidson

Fitzcarraldo Editions has hired Rachael Allen to launch a poetry list in 2025. Allen, who
previously started the poetry list at Granta, where she published authors such as Will Harris
and Sylvia Legris, and who publishes her own poetry with Faber & Faber, will run the new
list alongside editor and production manager Joely Day.

Their first acquisitions include works by Matthew Rice, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, Rebecca
Tamás, Oluwaseun Olayiwola and Pulitzer Prize-winner Diane Seuss. Fitzcarraldo Editions’
poetry list will feature four to six books per year, and will also include poetry in translation.
Art director Ray O’Meara is designing a new series for the list, to be unveiled later this year.

Diane Seuss’s 2022 Pulitzer Prize-winning frank: sonnets and her new collection Modern
Poetry
will debut in the UK as part of the launch list. In frank, Seuss moves nimbly across
thought and time, poetry and punk, AIDS and addiction, and Christ and motherhood, showing
us what we can do, what we can do without, and what we offer to one another when we have
nothing left to spare. Modern Poetry is a personal journey through poetic inheritance, moving
from Keats and Hopkins through to Stevens and Plath. A scholarly upending of literary
histories, it is self-deprecating, witty and formally groundbreaking. Diane Seuss is the author
of six books of poetry. For frank: sonnets, she also won the National Book Critics Circle
Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Prize. She was a 2020
Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2021 she received the John Updike Award from the American
Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Michigan. UK & Commonwealth excluding
Canada rights to both collections were acquired from Katie Dublinski at Graywolf Press.

Oluwaseun Olayiwola’s Strange Beach is a sensual and sensitive collection bridging
transatlantic cultures and foregrounding the semantics and somatics of love. Oluwaseun
Olayiwola is a Nigerian-American dancer, choreographer, poet, and critic based in London.
His poems have been published in the Guardian, Poetry Review and Granta. UK &
Commonwealth exc. Canada rights were acquired from Kirsty McLachlan at Morgan Green
Creatives. Strange Beach will also be published by Mensah Demary at Soft Skull in the US in
2025.

Matthew Rice’s Plastic is a book-length poem exploring the life of the industrial worker-
turned-poet, set during a single twelve-hour night shift in an injection moulding factory in
Northern Ireland. Matthew Rice is from Belfast. His first book, The Last Weather
Observer
 (Summer Palace Press, 2021) was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Best
First Collection. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s
University, Belfast. World rights were acquired from Rice, with North American rights sold
to Mensah Demary at Soft Skull.

POEMS by American poet Sasha Debevec-McKenney is a subversive collection that skewers
poetic precedent on precarity, race and pop-culture with comedy, craft, softness and sincerity.
Sasha Debevec-McKenney is currently a 2023-2025 Poetry Fellow at Emory University. Her
poems have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, The Yale Review,
Granta, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. UK & Commonwealth exc. Canada rights were acquired
from Katie Cacouris at the Wylie Agency.

Rebecca Tamás’s second collection contains three sequences, including a series of poems on
Joan of Arc, and a rewriting of the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King through an ecological
lens. Rebecca Tamás is the author of WITCH (Penned in the Margins) and Strangers (Makina
Books), which was longlisted for the Folio Prize. Rebecca’s writing has appeared in the
Financial Times, Guardian, i, the London Review of Books and Granta. World rights were
acquired from Emma Paterson at Aitken Alexander.
 
Of joining Fitzcarraldo Editions, Rachael Allen said: ‘I am hugely excited to be making space
for poetry with a list that will publish essential work, at a publisher I have adored and
admired since their beginning. These first poets we are publishing define the form, in
different ways, and are all expansive and generous in their thinking and approach. We will
continue to publish in this way, and the list will be defined by its authors, with ambitious,
innovative and progressive poetry.’
 
On co-editing the poetry list, Joely Day added: ‘It’s long been a dream of mine to expand the
Fitzcarraldo Editions list to include poetry. I couldn’t be happier to be co-editing the list with
Rachael, whose work at Granta I so admired and whose own poetry I return to often.’

Publisher Jacques Testard said: ‘Rachael Allen is one of the leading poets of her generation
and has been one of the most important publishers of poetry in Britain in the last decade
through her work with Clinic and Granta. I’d always thought that in order to be a serious
publishing house we needed a poetry list, and I’m very excited to see what she and Joely will
be publishing in the coming years.’

The launch of the Fitzcarraldo Editions poetry list is funded by a donation from the T. S. Eliot
Foundation, which recently became a minority shareholder in the publishing house via its
commercial arm, Set Copyrights Limited. Clare Reihill, a trustee of the Foundation, has taken
up a seat on Fitzcarraldo Editions’ board as a non-executive director.

A letter from Marianne Brooker, author of INTERVALS

Dear reader, 

Intervals opens with a gift, a wish, a promise. Beginning where I least expected to begin, writing drew me back to a council flat in the early nineties and to my mum’s easy initiation into my rag-tag circle of imaginary friends. From there, we carved out a shared space: an anything-goes, us-against-the-world, never-say-never island of mutual belief. Over the years, that imaginative space expanded, just as our material world contracted. Play revealed itself as a kind of power, not so much a retreat as a refusal. But it could only get us so far.

My mum was diagnosed with primary progressive multiple sclerosis in 2009, and died from stopping eating and drinking in 2019. Intervals is an attempt at reckoning with personal, ethical and political questions of choice: what does it mean to defend one’s autonomy in a world choked by austerity, or to speak of dignity without denying the realities of dependency and doubt? The questions are not individualizing – did she jump or was she pushed? – but collective: was there even ground beneath her feet? What kind of world have we built for one another?

So much of this narrative is particular – her habits, gestures and eccentricities; the varied particulars of love and living together. But these personal aspects emerge from overlapping and common (sometimes contradictory) conditions. I wanted to write a book that captured it all: the singular and the common; the middle space between the two. 

The notion of the interval arrived early, and has been a generative space to write from. Intervals are temporary places of rupture and of rest; they are liminal, partial and in-between. Writing at intervals, outside of the day to day run of expectation and obligation, I make a deal with you, the reader. I invite you to bear loose witness – to sit with me, as close to the pain as I can get – on the condition that the story doesn’t end here, that there is yet a world to win. 

Marianne Brooker, 2024

Publishing assistant – deadline 4 March

Fitzcarraldo Editions is seeking a Publishing Assistant to support our growing team in Deptford, south-east London, and ensure the smooth day-to-day running of the publishing house.

The Publishing Assistant’s responsibilities will include providing general administrative support to the Publisher and the rest of the team; managing the info@fitzcarraldoeditions email address; submissions to literary prizes; sending author mailings and finished copies; occasional proofreading and copy-checking; supporting editorial, publicity, marketing, sales, rights and production when required; assisting with author care; assisting in the management of ecommerce and subscriptions.  

The position will suit someone able to work as part of a small team but also willing to use their initiative, with good communication and organization skills, an ability to work well under pressure, and excellent attention to detail. The ideal candidate will be enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the Fitzcarraldo Editions catalogue, and contemporary literature in general. Experience in publishing is a plus, but not essential.

This is a full-time position paid at £26,000 per annum with a three-month probationary period, starting as soon as possible. This role requires minimum three days a week in the office in Deptford, and will require some attendance at evening events throughout the year. Benefits include:

– 28 days paid holiday (including bank holidays), on top of Christmas office closure;
– pension scheme;
– summer working hours.

Please send a CV and cover letter to jobs@fitzcarraldoeditions.com by 4 March.

Balsam Karam’s books to read alongside THE SINGULARITY

Balsam Karam, author of The Singularity, published 17 January 2024 shares some books to read alongside her novel. To read an extract and order the book, please visit our website.

Sitt Marie Rose by Etel Adnan (Post Apollo Press, 1999)
Some books and authors never cease to bewilder you. I return to this amazing book
whenever I wonder whether it’s possible to write about horrors of war, hatred and the brutal
legacy of colonialism. But I also return to it to know more about love and resilience, and
the importance of literature.

Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison (Vintage, 1993)
No book or author has been as important to me as the great Toni Morrison. I came
across Playing in the Dark in my mid-twenties and ever since it’s been like a compass. It
keeps me rooted and on the right track.

Writing Beyond Race by bell hooks (Routledge, 2012)
Another compass of mine are the works of the one and only bell hooks. It’s hard to put
into words the importance her book Writing Beyond Race has had on how I position
myself as an author. To do that, I believe I must write a book myself. Soon enough!

How Europe Underdeveloped Africa by Walter Rodney (Verso, 2018)
An absolutely essential book on how the division of the world as we know it came to be.
It offers context and history, as well as answers to the possibility – and necessity – of
making a shift to balance.

The Book of Questions by Edmond Jabès (Wesleyan UP, 1993)
Even though I love writing prose, I mostly tend to read poetry (true story). The Book of
Questions
is perhaps the most intriguing and devastating book of poetry I’ve read. I
return to it whenever I doubt the power and beauty of words, but also to remind myself
that books can be wild, fragmented and absolutely true to themselves.

Blue Eyes, Black Hair by Marguerite Duras (Harper Collins, 1988)
To read Marguerite Duras is to have the intensity of poetry with the density of prose. On
top of that, one has love affairs, a lot of drinking and a piercing political framework. I
truly love all Duras’ works and Blue Eyes, Black Hair is an amazing, queer novel on
love, loss and desire. And of course a bit of drinking.

Fitz Carraldo Editions