Sadly Mick Farren collapsed and died while performing on stage with The Deviants on Saturday night (July 27, 2013). A scholar, a gent, a rock n roller, and a genius journalist and novelist, Mick was working with us to reissue digitally some of his fiction. He was particularly proud of the audio inserts he recorded for the Ink Monkey editions, including this one for the digital edition of 'The Quest Of The DNA Cowboys'.
2013 – THE YEAR OF THE MONKEY
Press Release
A former Cabinet minister, a PhD from the creative writing programme at Newcastle University, a cultural historian and Demos associate and a founding father of the 1960s underground movement are amongst those authors whose work is published under the digital imprint Ink Monkey, which launches today. The company, set up by former Weidenfeld & Nicolson Publishing Director Neil Taylor, will run as a cooperative and has its first ten titles already available across all the major digital retailers including Apple, Amazon, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Sony, etc, with another ten to follow through the summer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4Ckk9FE99U
(You Tube Ink Monkey ident)
The focus of the list is contemporary fiction, crime, social history and pop culture — with occasional deviations into other genres. It mixes works by new and contemporary authors with some notable reissues. While sticking close to the mainstream, it doesn’t shy away from the avant-garde. Many of the books contain enhanced material, such as audio inserts, and all reissues come with additional contemporary material.
Titles available now include: Mickey The Mimic by Kirk Lake, a stylish noir thriller set in the vacuous world of 1990s BritPop/BritArt, Jonathan Aitken’s The Young Meteors, originally published in 1967 and the first book about Swinging London, Maurice Suckling’s Life With A Porn Queen, a road novel unlike any other, Nigel Fountain’s Underground: the London Alternative Press 1966-74, the classic, long-out-of-print survey work of the alternative magazines in Britain, Robert Hewison’s Too Much: Art & Society in the Sixties, 1960-75, the third part of his Arts in Britain trilogy (the other two are forthcoming), counterculture legend Mick Farren’s The Text of Festival and The Quest of The DNA Cowboys (as part of a general digital reissuing of Farren’s work), and two short, experimental works of fiction by a former Chairman of the National Poetry Society, Jeff Nuttall (What Happened To Jackson and Pig). Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture, one of the landmark works of the 1960s will be available in late July, with audio extras and an introduction by Jon Savage. Nigel Fountain’s Days Like These, a lefty-sleuth thriller, is also currently available, as is a work in progress which will be available in serial form free via the Ink Monkey website, Lilian Pizzichini’s Where The Bones Are Buried, a search for the extraordinary truth about the life of Mariella Novotny, agent provocateur, model, novelist and call girl, who died in suspicious circumstances in February, 1983.
The list is distributed by ePubDirect, which has access to over 1000 retail channels and 25,000 libraries. Books will also be available to purchase via the Ink Monkey website
through a third-party bookstore operated by Firsty Fish. Taylor, who as a publisher introduced a number of new voices to readers, most notably David Mitchell, John Boyne, Jake Arnott and Lawrence Norfolk, says, “The books will retail for the price of a decent cup of coffee — we’ll even make it decaf,” anti-mimicking Allen Lane’s famous value-for-money comment when setting up Penguin. Fiction will retail at £2.99 and non-fiction at £3.99.
“Publishing is still going through the technological flux that it is only now just starting to understand,” continues Taylor. “Times are more interesting than they have been in decades. Although the business still feels like a business more comfortable in plus-fours, it has become more diverse and more open to new ideas, and there is more opportunity for fresh writing than at any time previously, albeit on a different business model from the traditional one. Ink Monkey is looking at its lists thematically — the first has a vague 60s feel, which we will add to —but other different areas will follow. In the longer term it will move to a mixed business model, part conventional retail and part subscription, and hopefully we will attract more people into the fold businesswise. They will become part of the company; part of the company will become theirs. And I don’t want to shy away from the unconventional — that’s where all the fun is. As our motto says, we operate on a different frequency!”
Monkey Tales1: An Ink Monkey Sampler will be issued at the end of June, free to anyone who subscribes to the Ink Monkey site via the Ink Monkey Newsletter or follows ink Monkey on Facebook
(https://www.facebook.com/InkMonkeyBooks)
For more information please visit the website, or contact Neil Taylor:
Ink Monkey to Reissue Bomb Culture
Ink Monkey Books is release an enhanced edition of Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture later this summer. The landmark work which was first published in 1968 and has long been out of print helped shape the ideas of the counterculture, and belongs in that small category of era-defining books from the time that includes Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and Children of Albion (ed. Michael Horovitz). Nuttall’s work cast a long shadow (not least over himself) and has influenced a significant number of pop culture commentators since its original publication, including Jon Savage who will write an introduction to the 2013 edition. The Ink Monkey ebook will have embedded audio by the featuring Nuttall who was the former Chairman of the Poetry Society.
Ink Monkey are also reissuing a revised edition of Bomb Culture’s planned companion work, Art & The Degradation of Awareness which Nuttall published in 2001, shortly before his death. A number of shorter works by Jeff Nuttall, including What Happened To Jackson and Pig are currently available through Ink Monkey and all good ebook retailers, and a number of future titles are planned, including Snipe’s Spinster and the Performance Art Memoirs.
For further information, please contact neil@inkmonkeybooks.com or watch the Ink Monkey website for updates.