FLASH SALE ON OVERSTOCKS 50% OFF ONE WEEK ONLY

FOR THE FINAL WEEK OF MARCH A FLASH SALE OF 50% OFF OVERSTOCKS WITH CODE OVER50

on the following titles

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ACCIDENTAL FLOWERS

AN OUTBREAK OF PEACE

BRAT

DEPARTURES

DEVILSKEIN & DEARLOVE

DUSK

ERRATICS

FIVE BY FIVE

HAPPY ENDING NOT GUARANTEED

IN RETAIL

INCORCISMS

LET OUT THE DJINN

LIBERTY TALES

LONDON LIES

OUTCOME: LGBT PORTRAITS

SHORTEST DAY, LONGEST NIGHT

SPELLBINDER

STATIONS

STRANGE WATERS

Arachne Tenth Anniversary Sale – MARCH

Featured

We are celebrating our 10th Anniversary by exploring our back catalogue and inviting you to do likewise with special offers on books celebrating their anniversaries in each month.

So for MARCH we have a voucher, ARA10MAR, to get 50% off the following books

A470/A470 (Signed) Bilingual bestseller – Poetry for the Road, Cerddi’r Ffordd

A470

Noon 2018 flash fiction and poems for Solstice Shorts

Noon

Time & Tide/ Time & Tide special edition 2019 coastal stories and poems for Solstice Shorts

Time and Tide

This Poem Here by Rob Walton Covid response poetry

This Poem Here

All you need to do is use the code ARA10MAR at the checkout when you buy any or all of these books – you can only use the code once, so we encourage you to buy in bulk!

Arachne Tenth Anniversary Sale – FEBRUARY

We are celebrating our 10th Anniversary by exploring our back catalogue and inviting you to do likewise with special offers on books celebrating their anniversaries in each month.

So for FEBRUARY we have a voucher, ARA10FEB, to get 50% off the following books

 

the first few books are poetry, the last is an epic lesbian fantasy novel.

The Significance of a Dress by Emma Lee – a book that didn’t really get its moment in the sun, being published just as we went into lockdown, explores feminism and the refugee experience in sharp, effective poems.

In Retail by Jeremy Dixon tiny poems originally written on the back of till receipts behind the counter of a high street pharmacy.

Foraging by Joy Howard poems of natures and bereavement

With Paper for Feet by Jennifer A McGowan takes on Shakespeare’s women, witches, and folk tales from around the world, served up in witty pithy angy poems.

The Dowry Blade by Cherry Potts described by another Arachne author as Game of Thrones with lesbians and without dragons.

All you need to do is use the code ARA10FEB at the checkout when you buy any or all of these books – you can only use the code once, so we encourage you to buy in bulk!

Arachne Tenth Anniversary Sale – JANUARY

We are celebrating our 10th anniversary by exploring our back catalogue and inviting you to do likewise with special offers on books celebrating their anniversaries in each month.

So for December we had a voucher, ARA10DEC, to get 50% off the following books – mostly Solstice anthologies that month, which may not be a surprise, plus a YA Fantasy novel.

Because we hardly ever publish a book in January, we are extending the December voucher to the end of January, so keep using ARA10DEC for the solstice books, and we are adding the only January book Lovers’ Lies which is already reduced to £5, so if you use ARA10JAN you get it for £2.50! That’s clear, isn’t it??

 

 

Dusk 2017

Shortest Day, Longest Night  2016

 

Solstice Shorts, Sixteen Stories About TIME 2014

Tymes goe by Turnes 2020

Words From the Brink 2021

Spellbinder  2017

All you need to do is use the code ARA10DEC at the checkout when you buy any or all of these books – you can only use the code once, so we encourage you to buy in bulk!

Arachne Tenth Anniversary Sale – November

We are celebrating our 10th anniversary by exploring our back catalogue and inviting you to do likewise with special offers on books celebrating their anniversaries in each month.

So for November we have a voucher, ARA10NOV, to get 50% off the following books – all anthologies this month, as we often do a book to coincide with Short Story week in November.

Liberty Tales 2015 marked the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta and Arachne Press celebrated with an evening of stories, poetry and song on the subject of Liberty. The call out continued until the end of the year, and here are the collected and eclectic responses.

Outbreak of Peace Stories and Poems in Response to the End of WWI November 2018 marked the centenary of the end of World War I. After all the commemorative works of art over the previous four years, we felt it was important to reflect on what comes after – an outbreak of peace, and what that meant to the combatants and those left at home. This wide-ranging collection brings together stories and poems from many countries, on both sides of the 1914-18 conflict, finding their inspiration in many wars and their endings; together with stories and poems which are not about war at all, which is as it should be.

Stations Already reduced to £5 so with this offer a teeny £2.50! Twenty-four new short stories in homage to the East and South London section of the Overground Line: a story for every station from New Cross, Crystal Palace and West Croydon at the Southern extremes of the line, all the way to Highbury & Islington.

What Meets the Eye Poems, short fiction and scripts from UK Deaf, deaf and Hard of Hearing writers. on the theme of movement.

Departures: from The Story Sessions Stories and poems of leaving and going adrift, being left behind, taking wrong turns, stepping out of the everyday and making splendid leaps into the dark.The Story Sessions ran for four years in south London. Our monthly themed events took a lead from folkclubs, we had headliners, support acts and floor spots – Flash from the Floor, audience participation written in the interval.
The Story Sessions was an invigorating, sweet experiment, and we are proud to have created a permanent record – new stories from some of The Story Sessions stalwarts and discoveries.

 

All you need to do is use the code ARA10NOV at the check out when you buy any or all of these books – you can only use the code once, so we encourage you to buy in bulk!

 

Arachne Tenth Anniversary Sale – October

We are celebrating our 10th anniversary by exploring our back catalogue and inviting you to do likewise with special offers on books celebrating their anniversaries in each month.

So for October we have a voucher, ARA10OCT, to get 50% off the following books.

Outcome by Tom Dingley a collection of portraits of LGBT people with photos of themselves as children published 10/10/2015

Let Out the Djinn poems of everything from archaeology to space travel by way of growing up gay in the sixties and seventies by Jane Aldous, published 10/10/2019

The Don’t Touch Garden by Kate Foley 19/10/2016 poems exploring adoption and growing up in London during the Blitz, leading to a search for identy that includes coming out as a Lesbian

Where We Find Ourselves an anthology of stories and poems by UK writers of the Global Majority edited by Sandra A Agard and Laila Sumpton published  28/10/2021

All you need to do is use the code ARA10OCT at the check out when you buy any or all of these books – you can only use the code once, so we encourage you to buy in bulk!

 

Preventing Suicide one poem at a time

Today is Suicide Prevention Day. You might think, What’s that got to do with Poetry?

Quite a bit it turns out, for poet Jeremy Dixon, who recently won the Wales Book of the Year Poetry award.

We have a flash sale today only 50% off with the code PREVENT50 on print book from our webshop and audio or ebook from our e-store

Jeremy’s collection A Voice Coming from Then charts the homophobic bullying he experienced as a teenager and his subsequent suicide attempt, and recovery forging an identity for himself that rejected the negative image he had forced on him by the bullies. Along the way it is heartbreaking and hilarious and joyful.

Reading the poems in manuscript when Jeremy first submitted the collection I was sobbing uncontrollably within pages.

This is the precise response I sent to Jeremy whilst still mopping my tears.

Content warning notwithstanding, you may have to wait a while for a coherent answer, I’m already in tears and I’ve only got to Anne Sexton. Not feeling strong enough for this right now, but if they are all like this, it’s going to be an emphatic YES.

and not much later the same day

And then I had to go back and finish, and of COURSE it’s YES.

I don’t often weep over a MS, but as I know Jeremy a bit from publishing him before and meeting at events, it was probably tougher than reading these from a stranger. Which brings me to the vexed question of Content Warnings.

Jeremy has this to say on the subject in the introduction:

// a note on content warnings
For me content warnings really work. If I am not prepared then sometimes just seeing the word ‘suicide’ has an emotional effect.

And I get it, I really do, I have had a complete melt down from authors sending me (sometimes unsolicited, grrr) graphic distressing material without warning. Some of that is outrage that they think they can do that, at least in a bookshop you’ve chosen to pick the book up, in a MS there’s nothing to indicate what’s there until it’s too late. And I don’t voluntarily read things that are going to upset me, real life is quite sufficient, thanks. BUT it means I probably won’t pick up a book with a content warning on the cover. And other people may think twice too.

When we were recording the audiobook (voiced by the MAGNIFICENT Nigel Pilkington) we cautioned both Nigel and our sound engineer, Jess, that it was potentially an emotional listen, and Jess in particular just shrugged, and said ‘powerful, isn’t it,’ because we had warned her.

The book is peppered with statistics and there are resources at the end.

just one accepting adult
in a LGBTQ+ young person’s life
can reduce the risk
of suicide by 40%

 

 The Trevor Project, 2019

Jeremy says:

I wanted to be make the book as safe as possible. So as part of that I decided on this, the structure of the poems as couplets so that there would be nothing about the structure or the forms of the poems that would throw people, and then tied to that was the use of statistics to give a kind of grounding to give an overview, to give it a different voice, a research voice, but they were still formatted in the same way as poems so that they’re like tiny, tiny little poems themselves.

Homophobia, bullying, cruelty, suicide attempts… hard, hard things to experience, hard to write about, but in Jeremy’s careful, compassionate hands, emotional, but rewarding, cathartic and inspiring.

As Andy Welch one of the judges of the Wales Book of the Year said during the announcement on Radio Wales,

It just took me aback completely. It was so shocking, but something so beautiful to come out of it.

And Jeremy at the launch of the book said this:

I wonder if [writng the book] is another form of  potential protection… in some ways, it’s been a very healing process… once the poem’s written, and especially when it’s in a book,  there’s  another distancing. I think for me this relates to the book as an object. It’s like everything is contained in that book now, so I don’t need to carry it around with me anymore.

So if, like me, you shy away from a content warning, be encouraged, this is a generous kindly book that doesn’t want to steep you in trauma, it wants to share recovery and particular joy of looking back at a tough time and realising it really is the past, and that by writing about that past we can change our future.

Resources:

http://www.thecalmzone.net
The Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) aims to prevent male suicide in the UK.

http://www.tcf.org.uk
The Compassionate Friends offers many different kinds of support for bereaved families.

http://www.cruse.org.uk
CRUSE Bereavement Care provides support
and counselling to those suffering from grief.

http://www.ditchthelabel.org
An international anti-bullying charity.

http://www.hafal.org
Welsh charity for people with serious mental illness and their carers.

http://www.listeningplace.org.uk
Help for those who feel life is not worth living.

http://www.maytree.org.uk
Offers suicidal adults free short-term stays in a safe and caring environment.

http://www.papyrus-uk.org
Offers support and advice to young people at risk of suicide.

http://www.samaritans.org
Dedicated to reducing feelings of isolation and disconnection that can
lead to suicide.

http://www.uk-sobs.org.uk
The Survivors of Bereavement by Suicide (SOBS) supports all those bereaved or affected by suicide.

http://www.TheTrevorProject.org
The world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organisation for LGBTQ+ youth.

Arachne Tenth Anniversary Sale – September

We are celebrating our 10th anniversary by exploring our back catalogue and inviting you to do likewise with special offers on books celebrating their anniversaries in each month.

So for September we have a voucher, ARA10SEP, to get 50% off the following books, some of which are reduced already, so proper bargains!

London Lies our very first book and Liars’ League collaboration – stories about London, published 08/09/2012 here’s just one of the stories

Mosaic of Air  short stories fantasy, history, science fiction, LGBT by Cherry Potts, published 26/09/2013

Weird Lies  our third Liars’ League anthology science fiction, fantasy and the downright odd – also published 26/09/2013

Vindication poems from six women poets, published 27/09/2018 as part of our year of women celebration to mark the centenary of some women getting the vote (or regaining it, in some cases) in the UK.

All you need to do is use the code ARA10SEP at the check out when you buy any or all of these books – you can only use the code once, so we encourage you to buy in bulk!

 

Happy Birthday, A Voice Coming From Then!

Today is exactly one year since we published A Voice Coming From Then by Jeremy Dixon. Largely written and edited during lockdown, A Voice Coming From Then recently won the English-language Poetry award at the Wales Book of the Year 2022 and this has given us another chance to celebrate Jeremy and his extraordinary collection in real life.

We’re building an A Voice Coming From Then tour of Wales this Autumn, with events already planned at several libraries, independent bookshops and Waterstones stores across Wales this October and November.

If you run a bookshop, library, arts venue or poetry night, then please get in touch with us on outreach@arachnepress.com and let us know if you’d be interested in hosting an event with Jeremy Dixon as a part of this tour.

If you’re in Wales (or close by) and would like to see Jeremy reading from A Voice Coming From Then, please keep an eye on our blog and social media channels for the event dates and locations – coming soon!

For now, we are celebrating A Voice Coming From Then‘s book birthday with an online offer: buy a copy of the print book from our webshop and we’ll send you a code for 50% off the ebook or audiobook, which is beautifully narrated by Nigel Pilkington.

A Voice Coming From Then starts with Jeremy Dixon’s teenage suicide attempt and expands to encompass themes of bullying, queerphobia, acceptance and support.

As well as exploring identity, the tragic effects of bullying and the impact of suicide, this collection also includes unexpected typography, collage, humour, magic, discotheques and frequent appearances from the Victorian demon, Spring-heeled Jack.

One of the Wales Book of the Year judges commented: “I really admire Jeremy’s ability to be so vulnerable. I felt like he just really put his heart and his whole self into the collection.” Congratulations to Jeremy on having this immensely personal and moving collection out in the world for a whole year. 

Audio books live on Arachne Website

It’s taken a while, but we have finally got a way of selling our audiobooks direct. We are partnering with Glassboxx and the sales are hosted on their site.

To celebrate, we are offering 50% off any one of our audio titles from now until the end of March.

Head over to our audiobooks page, and have a listen to the samples, and when you’ve decided which you would like, click the relevant ‘buy now’ link, and use the code audio intro at the checkout.

I think I’ve set it up right, but if you have problems please let us know at once!