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 Significance of a Dress
Foraging
With Paper for Feet
In Retail
The Dowry Blade
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!
To celebrate our tenth anniversary we are having an online festival throughout January 2023, mostly weekends and Thursdays, although a couple of Tuesdays and Fridays have snuck in.
We invited our authors and friends to run the events they wanted to see, to set their own prices and number of tickets. It’s quite an eclectic mix, readings, discussions and workshops for writers, and about writing, or the business of being a writer. We invite you to join us! Visit the Eventbrite Collection
Saturday 14/01/2023 15:00 reading/open mic/discussion Jeremy Dixon & Cherry Potts Joy//Us LGBTQ Poetry
40 places free/donation
including 10 open mic spots of 3 mins each – max 2 poems! details and tickets
Sunday 15/01/2023 15:00-16:30 Lowri Williams Translating poetry from Welsh into English (workshop)
suitable for advanced learners of Welsh and native speakers.
10 places – pay what you can £3/£5/£8 details and tickets
Tuesday 24/01/23 18:00-19:30 The Business of writing– The Society of Authors This is very kindly being run for us by two of the coordinators of the Society of Authors Poetry & Spoken Word group: Johanna Clarke and Mathilde Zeeman
Thursday 26/01/2023 19:00-20:30 Nikita Chadha The Empire Writes Back: “Space, place and belonging” Interactive lecture/workshop
15 places £10 details and tickets
Friday 27/01/2023 18:30-20:00 Seni Seneviratne Using family history/photos as inspiration for poetry (workshop)
20 places £12-£20 details and tickets
Sunday 29/01/2023 11:00-13:00 discussion/reading Clare Owen Cormorants and #cornishgothic: creative ways to write about YA mental health.
15 places £5 details and tickets
Sunday 29/01/2023 15:00-16:30 workshop Saira Aspinall Marketing on a tight budget for writers
12 places £10 details and tickets
For #LoveAudio week today we have an unsettling tale by short story writer David Hartley, read brilliantly by Margaret Ashley.
Margaret is an actress and multi-nominated voice actor – she is currently nominated for the Best Radio Drama Performance in the 2021 OneVoice Awards – and we are delighted to have had the opportunity to work with her on several of our recent audio books.
”David Hartley’s tiny fictions are elusive and teasing and true. They’re like the fading echoes of dreams you struggle to remember when you wake up in the morning – the bits that you know didn’t quite make sense, and made you feel strange and a little unnerved, but you knew were important, so important, if only you could hold on to them forever.” – Robert Shearman
#LoveAudio is the Publisher’s Association annual week-long digital celebration of audiobooks is designed to showcase the accessibility, innovation, and creativity of the format.Follow the hashtag on twitter.
Part of our Women & SF/F event for Hither Green Festival.
Having discussed what we grew up reading, here’s a bit from one of Cherry’s early influences, her mum, Ghillian Potts. This is a section from Spellbinder, the middle book of the trilogy The Naming of Brook Storyteller.
The final installment, Wolftalker, is out on 7th June!
Cherry first read these books in her teens, and did a critique of them in her twenties, which was largely ignored!
Cherry Potts & Katy Darby Arachne Press authors and editors, talk about growing up reading SF & Fantasy, particularly by women, at Manor House Library for Hither Green Festival
For the completists amongst you, here is the list Cherry forgot to bring with her of lots of Sf/Fantasy books she loves, feel free to comment to add your own high points. There are loads more these were the ones that sprang readily to mind!
Growing up with SF/F – YA books and first reads…
Diana Wynne Jones The Spell Coat series
Susan Cooper The Dark is Rising
Sylvia Engdahl Heritage of a star
Jan Mark: Useful Idiots/ Riding Tycho/ The Ennead
Andre Norton Forerunner Foray, Plague Ship, Moon of Three Rings, The Beastmaster,Mark of the Cat, Witchworld series, Octagon Magic, Steel Magic etc
Tanith Lee The Dragon Hoard, Kill the Dead, Companions on the Road, Drinking Sapphire Wine
Ursula le Guin Earthsea series, Lathe of Heaven, Rocannon’s World, Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed (actually pretty much anything by Ursula)
Helen Simpson Ingo series
Joy Chant Red Moon, Black Mountain
Pamela Sargeant Women of Wonder anthologies
Writers discovered in the 70s and 80’s
Margaret AtwoodHandmaid’s Tale
Joanna Russ We Who are About to
Jaygee Carr Leviathan’s Deep, Navigator Syndrome
Joan D Vinge Snow Queen, Catspaw,
Jane Yolen Cards of Grief, Briar Rose, short stories,
Vonda McIntyre Fireflood and other stories, Dreamsnake
Elizabeth A Lynn The Woman who Loved the Moon
C J Cherryh Faded Sun, Brothers of Earth, Heavy Time, the Morgaine series
Marian Zimmer Bradley Sword & Sorceress anthologies
Anne McCaffery The ship who sang, Pern series, Decision at Doona
Megan Lindholm Wolf Brother, Harpy’s Flight
Suzy McKee Charnas Walk to the Ends of the World, Motherlines
Nicola Griffith Bending the Landscape (as editor), Hild, Ammonite, Slow RIver
R A MacAvoy Tea with the Black Dragon
Kate Wilhelm The Infinity Box, Where late the sweet birds sing,
Classics:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman Herland, The Yellow Wallpaper
James Tiptree, Jr Houston, Houston do you read? (short story) Her Smoke Went Up for Ever
Naomi Mitchison Memoirs of a Space Woman
Vera Chapman Three Damosels
Zenna HendersonThe Anything Box
More recent:
Naomi Novik Temeraire series
Emily St John Mandel: Station Eleven
Aimee Bender The Colour Master (short stories) Kate Atkinson Not the End of the World, Life After Life
Women writers of SF/Fantasy published by Arachne Press
Anthologies: (stories with SF/F flavour by women, there is SF/F by men, and stories with nothing to do with either SF or fantasy in most of them!) Weird Lies (Alex Smith, Angela Trevithick, C T Kingston,Ellen O ‘Neill, Maria Kyle, Peng Shepherd, Rebecca J Payne) winner of Saboteur2014 best anthology award Lovers’ Lies (Mi L Holliday, Michelle Shine) We/She (J A Hopper, Joanne L M Williams, Jennifer Rickard, Elizabeth Hopkinson, Ilora Choudhury, Katy Darby) Five by Five(Katy Darby, Helen Morris) Solstice Shorts (Helen Morris, Imogen Robertson, Cindy George, Jayne Pickering) Shortest Day, Longest Night (Polly Hall, Katy Darby,Pippa Gladhill, Karen Bovenmyer, Cherry Potts, Frances Gapper) Dusk(Pippa Gladhill, Penny Pepper, Fiona Salter, Helen Slavin,Katy Lee) Liberty Tales (Katy Darby, Cherry Potts, Sarah Evans) Stations (Cherry Potts, Caroline Hardman)
Another gorgeous cover from Gordy Wright, and another great printing job from TJ International.
This is the third and final installment of The Naming of Brook Storyteller, and Brook (Brat-Spellbinder-Dragonfriend-Wolftalker) has taken on an apprentice, Cricket; but deadly plots are all around and it takes all her cleverness and resilience to get to the bottom of it all, with a lot of help from Cricket, and her ‘cousin’, the wolf, Drinks-the-Wind.
In the shops from 7th June (the day after Ghillian’s 85th Birthday).
Launch party still in negotiation but I will be able to reveal soon, I hope!