The Spoons That Are My Ears!

My forthcoming poetry book, THE COFFEE RUBAIYAT, has a cover and a publication date. September 16 from Alien Buddha Press, based in the USA.

This is a collection for coffee nuts like me.

I started writing it in June. It is exactly as long as the first edition of Edward Fitzgerald's translation of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and is about coffee instead of wine, because at the end of the day (and also at the beginning) I prefer coffee.

I am especially pleased that this one isn't self-published, even though I am very fond of my self-published poetry books.

It consists of 75 quatrains to match the 75 of Edward Fitzgerald's translation (the first edition). I preserved the AABA rhyme-scheme and mostly mimicked the metre (not always). One of my most ambitious poetry projects, I think.

I have my own publishing company, a very small one, I guess it should be called a micropress. It's a one-man outfit and I am the man. I started it up to self-publish books of mine that were unlikely to be accepted by traditional publishers (though as it happens, most of my experimental and OuLiPo works have been published by other small presses that are considerably bigger than mine).

As well as pubishing my own work, I always planned to publish books by other writers. Late last year I managed to secure the rights for a new English-language edition of the award-winning novel, A Handful of Sesame by Shrinivas Vaidya. I acquired the rights for all countries except India. Recently I acquired the rights for India as well.

The novel is available as a paperback and also as an ebook. A sweeping historical novel, it was shortlisted for the Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize in 2019. The original work Halla Bantu Halla won the Central Sahitya Akademi Award. The book was translated by Maithreyi Karnoor.

The novel is set in the fateful year of 1857. Here is part of the official description of what the book is about: 'Two brothers, emissaries of a northern king, on a mission to garner the support of the southern rulers, wander lost and hungry in a forest not far from their destination. They are captured and one of them is hung by the British. Caught in the rough and tumble of the mutiny, the other brother settles down in a place that was never meant to be more than a temporary refuge. He spends his life far away from home among people who do not speak his language.

The novel spans the story of three generations of his family living under the burden of inherited nostalgia, a story that unfolds with all its flying fancies and stumbling follies on the threshold between tradition and modernity. Set against the backdrop of the freedom movement, the novel explores the lives of the people of the Dharwad region of Karnataka; their acts of faith and the realpolitik of ritual. Masterfully and sensitively translated from the Kannada, A Handful of Sesame is funny, tragic, ironic, satirical, lyrical and deeply allegorical of a young, modern nation.'

I am raising the price of my ebooks (most of which are currently at 99 cents) by one dollar. This is because at the moment royalties are very small even when sales are quite good. To mark the occasion I am making nine of these ebooks FREE for a few days. This is a one-off and won't happen again. The ebooks in question are: