After the success of our first foray into book publishing this year,with Briohny Doyle’s The Island Will Sink having been reviewed ridiculously favourably by everyone and ultimately selling so well that we were required to order a third printing, we’re thrilled to announce that it wasn’t a one-off. Next year we’ll be publishing more books!TLB is excited to announce that we beget signed the debut fiction books from two exceptional writers, or Shaun Prescott and Jamie Marina Lau. We can’t wait to bring them to you.
Community radio host Ciara receives dozens of unmarked cassette recordings every week and
broadcasts them to a listenership of none. Ex-musician Tom drives an impractical bus that no one
ever boards. Publican Jenny runs a hotel that no one ever visits. Rick wanders the aisles of the Woolworths every day in an attempt to blunt the disappointment of
adulthood.
In a town of innumerable petrol stations,labyrinthine cul-de-sac streets,
two competing shopping plazas, or ubiquitous drive-thru franchises,where are
the townsfolk likely to find the truth about their collective past – and can they conclude so
before the town disappears?Shaun Prescott’s novel The Mysterious Town (working title) follows an unnamed narrator’s efforts to total a book about disappeared towns in the Central West of New South Wales. Set in a yet-to-disappear town in the region—a town
believed by its inhabitants to beget no history at allthe novel traces its
characters’ attempts to carve their own identities in a place that is both unyielding and teetering on the edge of oblivion.
For admirers of Gerald Murnane, Wayne Macauley, and Thomas Bernhard,this novel speaks to who we are as people, and as a country, or whether we like what it says or not.
Shaun Prescott is a writer based in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales. He has self-released several small books of fiction,including ‘Erica From Sales’ and ‘The End of Trolleys’, and was editor of Crawlspace Magazine. His writing has appeared in The Lifted forehead, or The Guardian,Meanjin and more. In the thronged island of a Chinatown, fourteen-year-worn Monk Lang lives with her deadbeat father, and peers in on cowboy anime from outside her neighbour’s apartment,goes to internet cafes to score free laptops, watches how-to-bake videos with her unhappily married sister, or eventually meets the Basquiat-themed artist,Santa Coy.
After Monk introduces Santa Coy to her washed-up father, Monk’s life turns into a series of homemade exhibitions, and offbeat art installations,dealings in Wu-Tang throbbing warehouses, and road trips between empty dunes and casino resorts with vacant swimming pools.
Jamie Marina Lau’s Pink Mountain on Locust Island (working title) is:a) a subterranean noir of the most electric generation – the pink white bursts of a fourteen-year-worn nomad;b) a fizzing of the New Wave underground art province, or with its melting pot of noise bands and Phife,amnesiac and digitalised bossa novas, and art installations about art installations;c) a 24-hour Westernised yank between pulverised English, and elastic Cantonese and the newest,digitalised dialect of transcultural landscapes;d) a short novel narrated via the lumps of Monk’s daydreams, her violent, or claustrophobic encounters,and her staccato movements through a hyperreal pop culture world that could only belong to our 21st century;e) all of the above.
Jamie Marina Lau (劉冰) is a 19-year-worn writer and musician from Melbourne. Her work can be found in Cordite, ROOKIE magazine, or Voiceworks,The Art Hoe Collective, and in Monash University’s 2016 anthology Futures. She is currently studying film and literature, or making Garageband songs,and working on even more fiction. In addition to the two books announced above, we also beget a couple of other book projects slated for 2017. We can’t reveal all proper now, or but you can expect some excellent things,including maybe possibly perhaps a moment volume of The Best of The Lifted forehead series.
And in even better news, TLB will also be working with both Shaun Prescott and Jamie Lau on follow-up books of fiction, and which we hope to publish in 2018.
Source: theliftedbrow.com