The Worm Hole will be on a break for Christmas and New Year. I’ll be posting my December reading round up and all the What’s In A Name category posts on the 1st January, and will be back fully on the 4th. I’ll likely be on Twitter and plan to spend more time commenting on other blogs in the next few days.

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and a happy new year to you all!

I like Pushkin Press a lot. They’re the people who published the awesome and bizarre story of writers bouncing around a grocery store due to the extremely compelling power of literature. They’re the people behind the Frenchman who pulls you into his epic Dumas-like adventure. They’re the people who translated the tale of elderly women busting out of their nursing home and engaging in a Battle Royale fight to the death. And they’re the people who gave us Man Booker short-listed Chigozie Obloma’s The Fishermen.

I’ve got the catalogue for next year, from January to June, and thought I’d share some of the books that have caught my eye. I should also mention that the publisher now has a couple of imprints – Vertigo, a thriller imprint, and One which publishes one exceptional work a year. If you wanted to start a collection you’ve certainly lots of time.

The first new title listed is Stefan Zweig’s Messages From A Lost World. I’ve seen the cover before, possibly on the site, or maybe another blog; it struck me as a good one to choose. Pushkin publish a lot of Zweig’s words. Truth be told I know nothing about him beyond what I’ve read in the catalogue – I’m still making up for the lack-lustre literary classes I attended at school – but he sounds worth the read. This particular book is a collection of essays and speeches from the 1930s and 1940s, ‘a defence of European unity against terror and brutality… a powerful statement of one man’s belief in the creative imagination and the potential of humanity’. These essays would have been written during twelve years – in 1942 Zweig and his wife were found dead. It was likely suicide.

I’m going to bypass the new Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. I could write a post the length of this one on how much and for how long I’ve had One Night, Markovitch on my to-be-read list. Sometimes, when my interest in a book is mostly down to the cover (it happens to the best of us), a cover change is enough to make me delete it from the list. Annoyingly, considering how many books I want to read, Pushkin’s change hasn’t altered my intrigue. Waterstones likes to use it as bait to get me to walk into their stores. They’ll win eventually.

Memories: From Moscow To The Black Sea is by Teffi. Teffi, an author of the early 20th Century, travelled around Russia on a reading tour whilst her fellow Russians fled the country. She eventually left, not knowing she wouldn’t be allowed to come back. She writes of her last months in Russia, an epic journey of two thousand miles. Pushkin have thought ahead – they’re publishing a collection of Teffi’s pointedly political writings, too.

Soft In the Head – I couldn’t not mark this one. Unsurprisingly ‘sunny’ but also ‘moving’, according to Marie-Sabine Roger’s fellow Frenchmen or women at La Marseillaise, this book is a tale of a wood-whittling graffiti-making young man and his friend, an eighty-five year old woman he meets on a bench. [Edit: I got the date wrong – it was written after Forrest Gump.]

So there you have it – a highly subjective, partly based on covers list of the books I believe may be the stand-outs from Pushkin’s future output. I’m loving the number of translation-based small publishers there are, glad we have so many and that they’re doing well.

Which small-press books, whether translated or not, are you looking forward to next year?

If, like me, your local shop appears to have bypassed the release date of 22nd June you may have already seen this book. Cited as a modern-day Dumas, French author Merle’s saga – acclaimed in its homeland – is being published in English by Pushkin Press.

The Guardian calls it ‘swashbuckling’, which sounds pretty good to me, and BBC History has its eye on best-of lists. First published between 1977-2003, it’s taken a while for it to get here but sounds worth the wait. If you like the English Tudor period and like the idea of crossing the channel to the land of Mary I’s younger husband, it might be for you.

Which is my extensive way of saying, I have 3 copies up for grabs – would you like one? Leave a comment to let me know, first come first serve. I’ll be reviewing the book shortly and am looking forward to it. It’s somewhat ironic that I’m reading around Dumas yet haven’t read the man himself but if this is good preparation for the lengthy classics that can only be a good thing.

Two questions today, then: would you like a copy of this book? And have you ever read books inspired by/akin to another but taken a while to read the original?

or I once dreamed of this, your future breath
in prayer for me, lost long, forever found;
or sensed you from the backstage of my death,
as kings glimpse shadows on a battleground.

— from Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Richard’

It’s that time of year again when I say goodbye for the holidays. I’ll be finishing up my latest rounds of editing this weekend and taking time away from blogging and editing over Christmas. I have to say it feels very strange to be writing this post on a day the heating hasn’t been on and I’m wearing a jumper simply because I feel I should, but that’s British weather for you, always unpredictable.

I’ll be posting my December round-up on the 31st and the What’s In A Name category posts will be up on 1st January. My year round-up I plan to post on the 2nd and it’ll mark my return.

Merry Christmas and a happy new year to you all. I may well comment on blogs over the holidays, but if not, see you all next year!