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.

Writer/editor Steven Partridge has posted a brilliant and amusing review of Crushed Mexican Spiders (the collection of short stories by Tibor Fischer published last year by Unbound) in which he discusses Possibly Forty Ships, the usually lesser mentioned but equally fantastic story, in interesting detail. We’ve put the review below, and you can head to Steven’s site for plenty of other great lit-related writing (book reviews, interviews, discussions of literary prizes etc.)

Flipping Tibor Fischer

by stevepartridge

The end papers of Tibor Fischer’s new book take design inspiration from Greek pottery and the London Underground. The former prefixes a story about the Trojan War, the latter a woman who returns to her London flat to find the locks are changed. The reader can choose which story to read first and then ‘flips’ the volume over to read the next one. As an artefact the book did feel as though I was handling a piece of priceless Grecian Pottery. It arrived bound in dark blue paper, the dust jacket photography is by acclaimed Czech photographer Hana Vojakova, the individual covers are beautiful, there’s a note on the book’s typeface and the endpapers are highly stylised and, according to the press release, finished with a subtle grey wash. Let’s see you do all of THAT on a Kindle. There’s no denying that as an object it’s certainly well considered but are the stories any good?

I read Possibly Forty Ships three times. The first attempt I had one eye on Eastenders and had no idea what was going on (in both the book and Albert Square) but by the third reading I think I had it sussed. A man is being interrogated with the threat of torture to recount his experience and involvement in the Trojan War, that staple of Homer’s Epics. It’s a brief retelling of the myth with a few gags thrown in: ‘Once you’ve had your wife in fifty-six positions, it’s not the same’. Poor Achilles is a trannie, no doubt his thigh high platforms the cause of his infamous podiatry problems; he ends up in the King of Ethiopia’s bed where he’s ‘bummed into madness’ to the extent that ‘you could drop a vole into his rear.’ The writing’s pretty clever: before being written down, Homeric myths were transmitted orally, probably like Achilles’ STIs, and the story is all dialogue. The man being interrogated uses a Homeric technique of repetition (an ancient rhetoric device that helped in the memorising of tales): ‘the truth? How do you define – ‘, ‘How do you define war? What is a – ‘, ‘How would you define a hero?’

Tibor’s style and the themes of failed marriages, sex and un-heroic heroes wouldn’t be out of place in a contemporary celebrity magazine, thus showing that stories in their general sense are timeless, the tales might be different but the human involvement is always recognisable. Likewise, war stories, possibly more so in our own times, are always distorted. The man questions his interrogator’s presumptions, claiming that a fleet was actually just a few ships (possibly forty), that not all the soldiers were heroes, some were blind and had chronic back pain. ‘It’s a pity pleasure can’t, like a stream, flow endlessly out of one person. There would be fewer burning cities.’ Read that in respect to a disgruntled Commander in Chief and the pursuit of war is all down to a lack of leisure time. Anhedonia is a warmonger.

Read the rest of the review here…

Tibor Fischer’s Crushed Mexican Spiders is available from: Waterstones, The Book Depository, The Guardian Bookshop, Amazon UK, Amazon US and more.

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…