Author Jessica Jones, whose book, The Elegant Art of Falling Apart is being crowd-funded for UK publication with Unbound, has been featured in The Independent this week, where she discusses how her experience of being paralysed for a period at the age of 25 eventually led to her writing the book.

(You can click here to find out more about the process of “crowd-funding” a book for publication, and how you can get involved and support the publication of The Elegant Art of Falling Apart in return for anything from your name in the back of every copy of the book, a signed first edition hardback, photographic prints, a goody bag of natural beauty products (The Good Glamour Natural Beauty Bag) and even lunch with Jessica.)

Also, we’ve launched a Flash Fiction Writing Prize in celebration of Jessica and her book, and you can find out more about the competition and how to enter by clicking here.

Read on for an extract from The Independent’s piece:

1987 – I was twenty-five years old and holed up in the intensive care unit at the National Neurological Hospital in London, stricken from head to toe with Guillain-Barré Syndrome. Symptoms: total paralysis. Prognosis: uncertain.

Guillain Barré Syndrome is a bizarre illness. It attacks the myelin sheath that transmits messages along one’s peripheral nerves. One day my toes went numb. A week later I found myself in hospital, unable to move, breathe or speak. An unscratchable itch on my leg could propel me to the brink of insanity. Dust fell into my eyes and I couldn’t blink or wipe it away. I could not call out for assistance.

Upon learning of my perilous condition, my mother had dropped everything, packed a suitcase and flown from Sydney. Now she sat by my bedside for twelve hours a day, every day.

Each night mum grabbed a few hours sleep at her friends’ house; Chrissy and Ralph were devotees of an Indian guru by the name of Swamiji. When Swamiji heard of my situation he began to call my mother and tell her of his visions for me. ‘I see yellow,’ spake the guru. The next day mum arrived at the hospital laden with armfuls of daffodils and yellow tulips. She filled all the vases in the room with them. Two days later, Swamiji called again: ‘I see purple.’ Out went the daffodils, replaced by swathes of irises. Mum herself was dressed in a purple silk kimono that she’d borrowed from Chrissy. Then Swamiji made a personal appearance at the ICU, without shoes. Through his flowing grey beard he blew into my chakras. Matron tried to hustle him from the room but Swamiji resisted her. At that point Sister Mary entered the scene.

Sister Mary had been hospitalised for an acute attack of Multiple Sclerosis but was now on the bounce back. She busied herself by ambling from ward to ward with her walking stick, rescuing the souls of fellow patients. Some of those ingrates did not wish to be saved but in me she found a compliant mark. Being fully paralysed I didn’t have much choice in the matter.

Sister Mary visited most days and sprinkled my motionless body with Lourdes water that she kept in a plastic bottle. She left a specimen jar by my bed containing some small pieces of black stuff. ‘Relics of Padre Pio,’ Sister Mary said. Not being much of a Christian I didn’t cotton on to the significance of these. I was quite taken aback when I later learned that they were bits of the charred remains of a revered Catholic priest.

Click here to read the rest…

Robert Llewellyn’s speech at the launch party for his new book, News From Gardenia. Available to pre-order now from Unbound.

The next Unbound Live event (you can read Intelligent Life’s review of our last one here) will be on Monday 4th June at the Hay Festival.
Tickets are only £6.25 and you can get them from here. Read on to find out more about the event…

UNBOUND LIVE!

The award winning crowd-funded publisher Unbound, launched at Hay last year, celebrates its first birthday with a live event unlike anything else at the festival. Join a panel of Unbound authors competing to win the approval of the crowd to raise funding for their book ideas, in a cross between an election hustings and a literary Dragons’ Den. Featuring super-smart comedian Katy Brand, controversial polymath Jonathan Meades, novelist and developmental psychologist Charles Fernyhough, cult perfomance poet George Chopping, the inimitable Glaswegian Sikh writer, cook and performer, Hardeep Singh Kohli and others.

www.unbound.co.uk

Lucy Farmer’s great review of last week’s Unbound Live event, in Intelligent Life :

On Tuesday night, Unbound Live took over Le Baron nightclub in London’s Mayfair for an evening of crowd-funded publishing. Billed as “a cross between a book slam and election hustings”, nine authors had 10 minutes each to pitch to an audience who could then pledge anything between £10 and £250 in support of the book. If enough money is pledged the author writes the book and Unbound publishes it. If not, the prospective book stays on the slush pile and pledgers get their money back (or the chance to re-pledge to another book). Pledgers keep up-to-date with their author’s progress on the Unbound website.

In a dark boudoir-like room the writers took to the mic in front of about 100 people. We heard pitches, for instance, from Pete Lawrence for his memoir about founding The Big Chill festival, from Kevin Parr for his novel about an obsessive bird-watcher who turns murderous, and from Robbie Hudson and John Finnemore, two comedians who got funding for a first book—a series of letters between two gay horses during the Napoleonic wars—and now want funding for a sequel.

By bringing authors and readers closer together Unbound throws a democratic punch at the big-money publishers who monopolise the book stores. For Unbound, the pledging system is a novel way of drumming up capital before shelling out to publish a book. And pledgers get to be financially and emotionally invested in a literary project. Every pledger gets a nod in the afterword and big investors get signed editions, goodie bags and lunch with the author.

Click here to read the rest of the review at Intelligent Life’s website.

A fantastic, funny review of the Unbound book Crushed Mexican Spiders, a collection of two short stories by Tibor Fischer, has been posted over at Metaliterature. Check it out:

”Just who Fischer thinks he is, first attacking Martin Amis and then telling me, his earnest reviewer, that “…most books reviews aren’t very well-written. They tend to be more about the reviewer than the book,” is an interesting question, and, frankly, one I don’t care much for. Me. I don’t care. I have other views too, which may or may not come out in the course of this review of a double-header by Fischer from the wonderful, wonderful people at Unbound. Okay, so I’m stuck in 2003, but then it was a nice place to be, with anticipation building at getting my hands on first a proof of Yellow Dog and then a pristine signed copy of Voyage To The End Of The Room. After 2003 it all felt a bit of a letdown, with the bathetic release of both to muted praise and fierce criticism.

“London has become a much more unpleasant place than it used to be. I don’t think that’s to do with any kind of recent climate of fear, it’s just that nothing works. There are just too many rats in the rat cage now.”

Read the rest of the review here…

Just installed the /ask feature, so feel free to fire away with all your questions about Unbound, our books, our authors, and publishing in general. We’ll do our best to answer them as quickly as possible.

Looking forward to hearing what you all have to say! x