Aaargh! Press was set up by cultural revolutionaries to transform the world – one word at a time.
Actually, it’s an alternative press just like all alternative presses – but we’re trying to do it with the technology of the age. We’re unashamed libertarian socialists, but most of all we want ideas to come out to play. Send us your proposals! Our titles are listed below. Click on the pictures below to buy them from Amazon.
NEW NOVEL BY KEVIN DAVEY
Playing Possum by Kevin Davey is an exuberant modernist reminder that T S Eliot was a fan of detective fiction, Charlie Chaplin and the music hall.
Fleeing from a violent incident in London in 1922, pursued by police and the author, Tom spends a troubled night in the Duke of Cumberland hotel in Whitstable. Demobilised soldiers hold a meeting below his window and a silent movie is being shot on the seafront. Davey draws on local history and literature, songs, films and artwork from the period to produce a novel Eliot himself would have enjoyed.
‘The year is 1922, the same year The Waste Land was published. That poem is famously made up of snippets of overheard conversation and found quotations and there is a large slice of this in Playing Possum too. Part of the pleasure for students of Eliot will be in tracing the references. The novel is full of the most astonishing and vivid writing. It’s almost as if the author is channelling the spirit of 1922 directly on to the page, as if he’s fashioned a time telescope through which we can look in on the scene 90 years earlier.’
C J STONE
OUR TITLES
Shots From the Hip by Charles Shaar Murray is now an Aaaargh! Press Kindle e-book. It’s available from Amazon here.
First published in 1991, it is a collection of Murray’s legendary journalism on music and much, much more from the 1970s and 1980s in New Musical Express and elsewhere. The Guardian described Murray as ‘one of the best British writers on pop music, and this is a compilation of HIS best’ – and it’s published here with a new introduction by Joel Nathan Rosen and a new afterword by CSM himself.
Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey is available as an e-book here and in paperback here.
‘A fine book you can read in a day. Anderson and Davey have taken advantage of the vast amount of research into communism since the end of the cold war. They wear it lightly and, refreshingly, are open about their political position. As members of the democratic left, they believe that communism was a disaster for left wing politics. It tied the left to tyranny and the lies that went with it.’
NICK COHEN
Reaching for my Gnu, a collection of poems by poet and performer Anna Chen is available as a paperback here and as a Kindle e-book here.
‘Brilliant and dangerous … one wild-ride roller-coaster that soars to altitudes of unfettered wit and then plunges with a startling and implacably knowing anger.’ MICK FARREN
‘Superb.’ GREG PALAST
‘Fierce, funny, moving and sulphurous.’ HEATHCOTE WILLIAMS
The Guitar Geek Dossier, a collection of columns from Guitarist by Charles Shaar Murray, is available as a Kindle e-book here and as a paperback here.
‘The Johnny Cash of rock journalism.’
PHIL CAMPBELL, MOTORHEAD
‘The rock critic’s rock critic.’
Q MAGAZINE
‘Front-line cultural warrior.’
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